Coral reefs are very important in Tanzania, both ecologically and socio-economically, as major fishing grounds and tourist attractions. Numerous fringing and patch reefs are located along about two-thirds of Tanzania’s coastline. These reefs have been partially to severely degraded by human (primarily destructive fishing practices) and natural (particularly coral bleaching) causes. These immedi...

Coral reefs, the most diverse of marine ecosystems, currently experience unprecedented levels of degradation. Diseases are now recognized as a major cause of mortality in reef-forming corals and are complicit in phase shifts of reef ecosystems to algal-dominated states worldwide. Even so, factors contributing to disease occurrence, spread, and impact remain poorly understood. Ecosystem resilien...

Marine spatial population dynamics are often addressed with a focus on larval dispersal, without taking into account movement behavior of individuals in later life stages. Processes occurring during demersal life stages may also drive spatial population dynamics if habitat quality is perceived differently by animals belonging to different life stages. In this study, we used a dual approach to u...

During an expedition in 2014 in the Gulf of Gabes that aimed to evaluate the impact of the pollution of the phosphate industry on the marine environment, numerous dead coral fragments were retrieved from several stations along a 18 km long transect in front of the industry complex of Gabes. Detailed taxonomy of these coral fragments shows clearly that all fragments belong to the species Cladoco...

1 Coral Reef Research Unit, School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, Colchester, UK, 2 Climate Change Cluster, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 3 Seychelles National Parks Authority, Mahé, Seychelles, 4 Research and Development Centre – Marine, Coastal and Small Islands, Universitas Hasanuddin, Makassar, Indonesia, 5 Central Caribbean Marine Institute, Princet...

Socioeconomic and ecological analyses of eleven coral reef conservation efforts make clear that marine protected areas are not the answer, and that in fact support of local communities is far more important than some government mandated 'fishing closure'. Apparently there are marine 'paper parks' just as there are terrestrial 'paper parks'.

Around the globe, coral reefs and other marine ecosystems are increasingly overfished. Conventionally, studies of fishing impacts have focused on the population size and dynamics of targeted stocks rather than the broader ecosystem-wide effects of harvesting. Using parrotfishes as an example, we show how coral reef fish populations respond to escalating fishing pressure across the Indian and Pa...

The Primeiras and Segundas Archipelago Reserve is a recently established marine protected area, the largest in Africa, located in the waters of Northern Mozambique. This protected area is of significant local economic importance and global ecological relevance, containing the southernmost coral reefs in Eastern Africa. However, information related to the marine ecosystem, notably benthic habita...

Inorganic nutrient availability affects organic matter fluxes and 1 metabolic activity in the soft coral genus Xenia 2 3 Vanessa N. Bednarz, Malik S. Naumann, Wolfgang Niggl and Christian Wild 4 5 Coral Reef Ecology Group (CORE), University of Bremen & 6 Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Ecology (ZMT), 7 Fahrenheitstr. 6, 28359 Bremen, Germany 8 9 10 *corresponding author, E-mail: vanessa.bedn...

Turf algae are multispecies communities of small marine macrophytes that are becoming a dominant component of coral reef communities around the world. To assess the impact of turf algae on corals, we investigated the effects of increased nutrients (eutrophication) on the interaction between the Caribbean coral Montastraea annularis and turf algae at their growth boundary. We also assessed wheth...