Cnidarians, such as corals and sea anemones serve as hosts to a variety of organisms including symbiotic dinoflagellates, bacteria, virus, and apicomplexans. As corals are vital to the health and productivity of the reef ecosystem it is important to understand how these organisms interact with each component of the holobiont....
Although only a minority of introduced species become established and have noticeable consequences in their new communities, some can displace native species, alter food webs, and cause local extinctions. Studying these invasive species can provide new insights into basic ecological questions as well as inform management strategies. Pacific lionfish (Pterois...
Ecologists must increasingly balance the need for accurate predictions about how ecosystems will be affected by climate change, against the fact that making such predictions at the ecosystem-level may be infeasible. Although information about responses of individual species to a changing environment is increasing, scaling such information to the community...
Invasive species are a growing global economic and ecological problem. Invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois spp.) are known to have extreme negative effects on coral-reef communities in the Bahamas, so understating their distribution within and among reefs, what limits their local movements, and the effects they have on native prey species...
The influence of the physical environment on organisms has long been a subject of ecological research. But, the complex drivers of environmental variation, and the multiple scales at which this can occur, make studying this topic a difficult challenge. In rocky intertidal habitats, oceanographic- and climate-scale variability influence benthic communities...
The multifaceted role of the environment in regulating the structure and dynamics of biological communities has long fascinated ecologists and motivated much debate and research. Now, in a time of accelerated global changes due to human impacts, the need to understand how the environment shapes communities has gained new urgency....
Interface habitats are considered valuable natural systems, tightly linked to adjacent habitats through the flow of matter and energy. However, there is limited research on mechanisms of connectivity such as movement of organisms and particulate matter and ways in which anthropogenic disturbance to interface habitats may affect immediate and adjacent...
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent threats to ecological communities and biodiversity, altering the distribution and abundance of species, disrupting existing species interactions and forming unprecedented ones, and creating novel ecological communities. Many of the most successful invasive species are also ecosystem engineers, species that physically modify the...