Fish Ecology Lab

🌊 New research alert! Angola’s fisheries are poorly documented, but this study offers key insights into decommissioning options like jacket removal or reefing and their impact on important fish species. Using high-definition ROV video, researchers analysed fish assemblages, confirming these structures support key fisheries while highlighting the need to consider fish assemblage dynamics and local stakeholder values and needs.

👏 Congrats to all the the authors: Karl Schramm, Euan Harvey, Brooke Marshall, Ben Saunders, Peter Oliver, Travis Elsdon, Michael Marnane and Anthony Rouphael.

🔗 Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141113625000686?via%3Dihub

www.sciencedirect.com

Dr Etienne Rastoin has just published his paper ‘Fluctuations of Galapagos mid-water and benthic reef fish populations during the 2015–16 ENSO’ in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science. The publication of this research is very timely, as we enter another El-Nino event.
Etienne conducted this research as a PhD student in the Fish Ecology Lab, and in collaboration with the Charles Darwin Foundation. Congratulations Etienne! Thanks to all collaborators and co-authors Etienne Rastoin-Laplane, Pelayo Salinas-de-León, Jordan Goetze, Ben Saunders, Simon McKinley, Courtney Norris, Corinna Gosby, Andrea Mattingly, Rodrigo Garcia, and Euan Harvey.
The paper is open access and can be found here:

Fluctuations of Galapagos mid-water and benthic reef fish populations during the 2015–16 ENSO El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have impacted the marine environment of the Galapagos, causing massive die-offs of corals and megafauna, an…

Congratulations to Jason Alexander who just had the second paper of his PhD accepted on environmental DNA . His research showed you really need to target your method of colletion to the types of organisms you want to sample. On subsea pylons to target epibenthic organisms you needed a sampling strategy and tool that came into contact with the structure. Water and plankton tows collected adjacent to the pylons sampled a different assemblage in comparison to Swabs and scrapes.
Thanks to Chevron for funding this research and CSIRO for supporting Jason's scholarship. Thanks to Michael Marnane, Justin McDonald, Sherralee Lukehurst, Travis Elsdon, Tiffany Simpson, Shawn Hinz, Mike Bunce and Euan Harvey for collaborating.
We acknowledge Kevin Holden of DeepVision for assistance with the ROV sampling.

Comparing environmental DNA collection methods for sampling community composition on marine infrastructure Broad scale monitoring of marine diversity is challenging, with many techniques limited to sampling only a small portion of the actual diversity prese…