Eliseo Fica Rojas

• Marine Biologist
• PhD Student at Universidad Austral de Chile

Background and Aims Ecological stability is central to understand the ability of natural systems to respond to disturbances, especially when these occur directly over important species within communities, such as foundational species. The bull kelp Durvillaea incurvata is common in intertidal and shallow subtidal rocky shores, supporting a diverse...

Kelp forests support species-rich food webs that predator-prey interactions may sustain. Here, we analyze prey availability and stomach contents of the predatory fish Prolatilus jugularis in an unexplored subtidal kelp forest of Lessonia trabeculata in south-central Chile. In the kelp forest, 42 invertebrate taxa and 1016 individuals were observed....

Los bosques de macroalgas son ecosistemas de gran importancia debido a su papel fundamental en la salud y la estabilidad de nuestros océanos. En los últimos años, la abundancia de los bosques de macroalgas ha disminuido producto de diversas perturbaciones de origen natural y antropogénico, como por ejemplo eventos de contaminación, introducción de...

Ecological stability is central to understand how disturbances challenge the persistence of populations and communities through time, particularly when species with strong effects on other species are disturbed. The bull kelp Durvillaea incurvata is a foundation habitat forming species that provides habitat, food, and shelter for various species, a...

Beta diversity measures the spatial variation in species composition. Because it influences several community attributes, studies are increasingly investigating its drivers. Spatial environmental heterogeneity is a major determinant of beta diversity, but canopy‐forming foundation species can locally modify environmental properties. We used interti...

Using intertidal communities dominated by a canopy-forming seaweed, we examined how foundation species canopies affect spatial environmental heterogeneity and the resulting beta diversity. Canopies reduce the spatial variation of temperature and desiccation during low tides. Consequently, a 32-month field experiment found that canopies limit beta d...

El presente texto tiene como propósito compartir algunas reflexiones en torno a la Residencia Navegable Radicante 2021, llevada a cabo en el maritorio de la región del Estrecho de Magallanes y la Antártica Chilena. Históricamente, los territorios australes que hoy poseen Chile y Argentina han sido catalogados por el eurocentrismo como las tierras d...

Ecological stability depends on interactions between different levels of biological organization. The insurance effects occur when increasing species diversity leads to more temporally invariable (i.e., more stable) community-level properties, due in part to asynchronous population-level fluctuations. While the study of insurance effects has receiv...

Junto al Laboratorio de Ecología Litoral de la Universidad Austral de Chile realizamos este poster para mostrar las especies comunes y recurrentes que se pueden observar en asociación a los bosques de huiro palo (Lessonia trabeculata) en la comuna de Corral (localidades de Morro Gonzalo y Huiro). El póster se elaboro con imágenes tomadas durante lo...

Improving our understanding of stability across spatial scales is crucial in the current scenario of biodiversity loss. Still, most empirical studies of stability target small scales. We experimentally removed the local space‐dominant species (macroalgae, barnacles, or mussels) at eight sites spanning more than 1000 km of coastline in north‐ and so...

Aim Understanding general spatial patterns of multiple species is a central aim of biogeography. Spatial analyses of coastal marine assemblages have shown an emergent pattern in that the variability in population abundances increases with increasing spatial scale of observation; i.e. a “red” spectrum of variation in population abundances. However,...

Functional diversity is intimately linked with community assembly processes, but its large-scale patterns of variation are often not well understood. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal changes in multiple trait dimensions (“trait space”) along vertical intertidal environmental stress gradients and across a landscape scale. We predicted that t...

ARTÍCULO Bio-incrustantes marinos en el canal de Chacao, Chile: un estudio sobre potenciales interacciones con estructuras manufacturadas por el hombre Marine bio-encrusting in the Chacao channel, Chile: a study of potential interactions with man-made structures Abstract.-The literature on marine bio-fouling (MBF) in Chile was revised and complemen...

The literature on marine bio-fouling (MBF) in Chile was revised and complemented with field data from the Chacao channel (Chiloé), identifying both the bio-fouling species associated with man-made structures (MMS) in the intertidal zone and species of algae, sessile and hemi-sessile invertebrates, present on natural substrata in the same area. In a...

Early ontogeny is considered to be one of the most sensitive stages in the development of marine calcifying organisms, this stage being highly susceptible to critical environmental changes, such ocean acidification (OA). The aim of this study was to evaluate the OA´s effects on intracapsular development traits, internal and external calcareous stru...