Indirect effects of overfishing on Caribbean reefs: sponges overgrow reef-building corals

Indirect effects of overfishing on Caribbean reefs: sponges overgrow reef-building corals

Consumer-mediated indirect effects at the community level are difficult to demonstrate empirically. Here, we show an explicit indirect effect of overfishing on competition between sponges and reef-building corals from surveys of 69 sites across the Caribbean. Leveraging the large-scale, long-term removal of sponge predators, we selected overfished sites where intensive methods, primarily fish-t...

Marine Reserves Enhance the Recovery of Corals on Caribbean Reefs

The fisheries and biodiversity benefits of marine reserves are widely recognised but there is mounting interest in exploiting the importance of herbivorous fishes as a tool to help ecosystems recover from climate change impacts. This approach might be particularly suitable for coral reefs, which are acutely threatened by climate change, yet the trophic cascades generated by reserves are strong ...

Sponge Communities on Caribbean Coral Reefs Are Structured by Factors That Are Top-Down, Not Bottom-Up

Caribbean coral reefs have been transformed in the past few decades with the demise of reef-building corals, and sponges are now the dominant habitat-forming organisms on most reefs. Competing hypotheses propose that sponge communities are controlled primarily by predatory fishes (top-down) or by the availability of picoplankton to suspension-feeding sponges (bottom-up). We tested these hypothe...

Phosphomonoesterases in Reef-Building Corals.

Functional Roles of Sponges on Coral Reefs

ALTHOUGH a small group of carbonate excavating sponges can dismantle reefs, and some sponges can overgrow corals, it is now known that sponges also substantially benefit coral reefs and associated ecosystems. Sponges benefit reefs by efficiently filtering small (<5um) organic particles from the water column, binding live corals to the reef frame, facilitating regeneration of broken reefs, provi...