The pantropical red-footed booby Sula sula is one of the most polymorphic seabirds. In the Indian Ocean most extant colonies hold white morph adults except on Europa Island (southern Mozambique Channel), where adults are of the white-tailed brown morph and on Tromelin Island (western Indian Ocean), where one-third of the birds are of the white-tailed brown morph and two-thirds are of the white ...

Compilation of a checklist of Recent thecideoid brachiopods from the Indian Ocean and Red Sea indicates that members of this superfamily are represented by a small number of species. The subfamily Lacazellinae is represented by Ospreyella maldiviana from the Maldive Islands but the presence of Lacazella cannot yet be confirmed in the Indian Ocean as the holotype of Lacazella mauritiana from Mau...

In this contribution, we determine the genetic population structure in the Skunk Clownfish (Amphiprion akallopsisos) across the Indian Ocean, and on a smaller geographic scale in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO). Highly restricted gene flow was discovered between populations on either side of the Indian Ocean using the control region as a mitochondrial marker (mtDNA). We verify this conclusion us...

Blue whales are little studied, face significant anthropogenic threats and within the Northern Indian Ocean, have a restricted range, making them an archetype for conservation needs of megafauna around the world. We studied feeding behavior of blue whales using dietary DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples. While globally blue whale populations feed predominantly on Euphausiidae, 87% of prey DNA a...

[1] Climate models often project an increase of rainfall under global warming over the climatologic wet regions from the global zonal-mean perspective. However, this “rich-get-richer” mechanism is not valid on a basin scale. In this study by analyzing climate change experiment outputs from an idealized atmospheric general circulation model with uniform sea surface warming and the Coupled Model ...

The observational analysis reveals two distinct precipitation modes, the zonal dipole (DP) mode and the monopole (MP) mode, in the tropical Indian Ocean (TIO) during the El Niño mature winter, even though sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) have a similar basinwide warming pattern [referred to as the Indian Ocean basin mode (IOBM)]. The formation of the two precipitation modes depends on ...

[1] El Niño/La Niña onset is a challenging problem of ENSO prediction. In this study, we introduce two precursors of El Niño and La Niña onsets. One is the equatorial heat content, and the other is the Western Pacific (WP) wind. When the two precursors are considered together, both the El Niño and La Niña onsets can be highly predictable. In particular, the persistence of the WP wind is more im...

Tsunami of 2004, caused by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, is the most devastating tsunami in modern times, affecting 18 countries in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, killing more than 250,000 people in a single day, and leaving more than 1.7 million homeless. However, less reported, albeit real, is its impact in the islands of the Indian Ocean more than 1,000 miles away from its epicenter. This...