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124
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
May 2018 - February 2022
May 2016 - present
Queensland Museum Network
Position
- Senior Curator - Corals
January 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (124)
Accumulating impacts
Anthropogenic climate change is now in full swing, our global average temperature already having increased by 1°C from preindustrial levels. Many studies have documented individual impacts of the changing climate that are particular to species or regions, but individual impacts are accumulating and being amplified more broadly....
Ecological communities that occupy similar habitats may exhibit functional convergence despite significant geographical distances and taxonomic dis- similarity. On coral reefs, steep gradients in key environmental variables (e.g. light and wave energy) restrict some species to shallow depths. We show that depth-generalist reef fishes are correlated...
Habitat structural complexity is a key factor shaping marine communities. However, accurate methods for quantifying structural complexity underwater are currently lacking. Loss of structural complexity is linked to ecosystem declines in biodiversity and resilience. We developed new methods using underwater stereo-imagery spanning four years (2010-2...
Spatially explicit information on species distributions for conservation planning is invariably incomplete, and therefore requires the use of surrogates to represent broad-scale patterns of biodiversity. Despite significant interest in the effectiveness of surrogates for predicting biodiversity, few studies explore questions involving the ability o...
During 2015-2016, record temperatures triggered a pan-tropical episode of coral bleaching, the third global-scale event since mass bleaching was first documented in the 1980s. Here we examine how and why the severity of recurrent major bleaching events has varied at multiple scales, using aerial and underwater surveys of Australian reefs combined w...
Deep sea benthic habitats are low productivity ecosystems that host an abundance of organisms within the Cnidaria phylum. The technical limitations and the high cost of deep sea surveys have made exploring deep sea environments and the biology of the organisms that inhabit them challenging. In spite of the widespread recognition of Cnidaria's envir...
Addressing anthropogenic threats compromising the persistence of tropical marine ecosystems requires an understanding of the fundamental ecological functions these organisms fulfil. Habitat provision is a major function of corals in tropical marine ecosystems, although most research in this area has concentrated on scleractinians (hard corals). Her...
Deep-sea lineages are generally thought to arise from shallow-water ancestors, but this hypothesis is based on a relatively small number of taxonomic groups. Anthozoans, which include corals and sea anemones, are significant contributors to the faunal diversity of the deep sea, but the timing and mechanisms of their invasion into this biome remain...
Context
Increasing interest in mesophotic coral ecosystems has shown that reefs in deep water show considerable geomorphic and ecological variability among geographic regions.
Aims
We provide the first investigation of mesophotic reefs at the southern extremity of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) to understand the biotic gradients and habitat niches i...
Molecular phylogenetics has fundamentally altered our understanding of the taxonomy, systematics and biogeography of corals. Recently developed phylogenomic techniques have started to resolve species-level relationships in the diverse and ecologically important genus Acropora, providing a path to resolve the taxonomy of this notoriously problematic...
Herbivorous fishes play important functional roles in coral reef ecosystems, and their influence on mediating competitive dynamics between corals and macroalgae is well studied. Nonetheless, direct interactions between herbivorous fishes and corals may also be relevant, although these are less studied. Here, we describe a series of observations of...
Deep sea benthic habitats are low productivity ecosystems that host an abundance of organisms within the Cnidaria phyla. The technical limitations and the high cost of deep sea surveys have made exploring deep sea environments and the biology of the organisms that inhabit them challenging. In spite of the widespread recognition of Cnidaria's enviro...
Deep sea benthic habitats are low productivity ecosystems that host an abundance of organisms within the Cnidaria phyla. The technical limitations and the high cost of deep sea surveys have made exploring deep sea environments and the biology of the organisms that inhabit them challenging. In spite of the widespread recognition of Cnidaria's enviro...
Substratum preferences and contact interactions among sessile organisms can be a major determinant of biotic gradients in the structure of benthic communities on coral reefs. Sponges are a substantial component of these communities, but their substratum requirements and interactions with other benthic taxa are poorly understood. Here, we quantified...
We describe five new species of black corals from the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea, collected at depths ranging from 14 to 789 m: two in the family Antipathidae (Antipathes falkorae sp. nov. and Antipathes morrisi sp. nov.), two in the family Aphanipathidae (Aphanipathes flailum sp. nov. and Rhipidipathes helae sp. nov.), and one in the family...
Insights into assemblages that can persist in extreme environments are still emerging. Ocean warming and acidification select against species with low physiological tolerance (trait‐based ‘filtering’). However, intraspecific trait variation can promote species adaptation and persistence, with potentially large effects on assemblage structure. By sa...
Hydrodynamics on coral reefs vary with depth, reef morphology and seascape position. Differences in hydrodynamic regimes strongly influence the structure and function of coral reef ecosystems. Submerged coral reefs on steep-sided, conical bathymetric features like seamounts experience enhanced water circulation as a result of interactions between c...
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
Biogenic reefs have been hotspots of biodiversity and evolutionary novelty throughout the Phanerozoic. The largest reef systems in Earth's history occurred in the Devonian period, but collapsed during the Late Devonian Mass Extinction. However, the consequences for the functional diversity of Palaeozoic reefs have received little attention. Here, w...
Coral research is being ushered into the genomic era. To fully capitalize on the potential discoveries from this genomic revolution, the rapidly increasing number of high-quality genomes requires effective pairing with rigorous taxonomic characterizations of specimens and the contextualization of their ecological relevance. However, to date there i...
Coral reefs exhibit consistent patterns in biodiversity across multiple spatial scales, from local to global clines in species richness, abundance and community structure. Knowledge of fundamental processes driving these patterns is largely derived from studies of shallow, emergent and nearshore reefs. Although research efforts are expanding to dee...
Palaeozoic coral communities were dominated by two extinct coral groups: Tabulata and Rugosa. Whilst they are not closely related to modern Scleractinia, they are morphologically convergent, displaying many morphological characters that allow comparisons between recent and ancient coral reef communities. The extensive shallow-water reef communities...
Thanks to the availability of large digital collections of coral images and because of the difficulty for experts to manually process all of them, it is possible and valuable to apply automatic methods to identify similar and relevant coral specimens in a coral specimen collection. Given the digital nature of these collections, it makes sense to le...
Despite increasing threats to Tonga’s coral reefs from stressors that are both local (e.g. overfishing and pollution) and global (e.g. climate change), there is yet to be a systematic assessment of the status of the country’s coral reef ecosystem and reef fish fishery stocks. Here, we provide a national ecological assessment of Tonga’s coral reefs...
Combining no‐take marine reserves with exclusive access by communities to unreserved waters could provide the required incentives for community management to achieve positive impacts. However, few protected areas have been critically evaluated for their impact, which involves applying counterfactual thinking to predict conditions within protected a...
Blastopathes medusa gen. nov., sp. nov., is described from Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea, based on morphological and molecular data. Blastopathes, assigned to the Antipathidae, is a large, mythology-inspiring black coral characterized by clusters of elongate stem-like branches that extend out at their base and then curve upward. Colonies are not pinn...
Targeted enrichment of genomic DNA can profoundly increase the phylogenetic resolution of clades and inform taxonomy. Here, we redesign a custom bait set previously developed for the cnidarian class Anthozoa to more efficiently target and capture ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and exonic loci within the subclass Hexacorallia. We test this enhanced...
Systematic conservation planning requires spatial information on biodiversity. Such information is often unavailable, forcing spatial planning to rely on assumed relationships between species and environmental features. This problem is particularly acute in large, remote marine protected areas that are proliferating rapidly. Here, we use models to...
The expansion of coastal marine protected areas can suffer from two key drawbacks: (a) the difficulty of incentivizing local communities to manage areas for conservation when their livelihoods also depend on resource use; and (b) that many protected areas get situated residually, or in locations with limited value for either biodiversity conservati...
The structure and function of coral reef ecosystems is increasingly compromised by multiple stressors, even in the most remote locations. Severe, acute disturbances such as volcanic eruptions represent extreme events that can annihilate entire reef ecosystems, but also provide unique opportunities to examine ecosystem resilience and recovery. Here,...
Comparative lists of species’ extinction risk are increasingly being used to prioritise conservation resources. Extinction risk is most rigorously assessed using quantitative data on species’ population trajectories, but in the absence of such data, assessments often rely on qualitative estimates based on expert opinion of species abundances, distr...
This erratum is published as vendor overlooked corrections with misspelt scientific wording of family Siderastreidae.
The phylogenetic utility of targeted enrichment methods has been demonstrated in 34 taxa that often have a history of single gene marker development. These genomic capture 35 methods are now being applied to resolve evolutionary relationships from deep to shallow 36 timescales in clades that were previously deficient in molecular marker development...
The phylogenetic utility of targeted enrichment methods has been demonstrated in taxa that often have a history of single gene marker development. These genomic capture methods are now being applied to resolve evolutionary relationships from deep to shallow timescales in clades that were previously deficient in molecular marker development and lack...
Environmental conditions and anthropogenic impacts are key influences on ecological processes and associated ecosystem services. Effective management of Tonga’s marine ecosystems therefore depends on accurate and up-to-date knowledge of environmental and anthropogenic variables. Although many types of environmental and anthropogenic data are now av...
Natural environmental gradients encompass systematic variation in abiotic factors that can be exploited to test competing explanations of biodiversity patterns. The species-energy (SE) hypothesis attempts to explain species richness gradients as a function of energy availability. However, limited empirical support for SE is often attributed to idio...
Without drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate globalized stressors, tropical coral reefs are in jeopardy. Strategic conservation and management requires identification of the environmental and socioeconomic factors driving the persistence of scleractinian coral assemblages—the foundation species of coral reef ecosystems. Here, we...
Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) have received increasing attention in recent years in recognition of their unique biodiversity and also their potential importance as refuges from disturbance events. However, knowledge of the composition of MCEs and how they vary in space is lacking in many regions, particularly the Coral Triangle biodiversity ho...
Coral bleaching causes coral mortality that has knock-on effects on reef ecosystems, including reductions of some fish species. However, the extent of coral bleaching varies consider- ably among habitats. For example, deeper areas of reefs typically bleach less than areas in the shallows. However, rates of coral mortality at depth and the knock-on...
Spatial refuges in peripheral habitats will become increasingly important for species persistence as climate change and other disturbances progressively impact habitat quality and assemblage compositions. However, the capacity for persistence will be determined in part by species‐specific abilities to absorb costs related to altered or decreased qu...
Aim
Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) are unique communities that support a high proportion of depth‐endemic species distinct from shallow‐water coral reefs. However, there is currently little consensus on the boundaries between shallow and mesophotic coral reefs and between upper versus lower MCEs because studies of these communities are often si...
The original online version of this chapter was inadvertently published with incorrect initials of the author of the Chapter 20 as Tom L.L. Bridge. The correct name of this author is Tom C.L. Bridge. This has now been corrected.
Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) and temperate mesophotic ecosystems (TMEs) have received increasing research attention during the last decade as many new and improved methods and technologies have become more accessible to explore deeper parts of the ocean. However, large voids in knowledge remain in our scientific understanding, limiting our ab...
Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs), which comprise the light-dependent communities of corals and other organisms found at depths between 30 and ~150 m, have become a topic that increasingly draws the attention of coral reef researchers. It is well established that after the reef-building scleractinian corals, octocorals are the second most common g...
This book summarizes what is known about mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) geographically and by major taxa. MCEs are characterized by light-dependent corals and associated communities typically found at depths ranging from 30-40 m. and extending to over 150 m. in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. They are populated with organisms typically ass...
On coral reefs, depth and gradients related to depth (e.g. light and wave exposure) influence the composition of fish communities. However, most studies focus only on emergent reefs that break the sea surface in shallow waters (<10 m). On the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), submerged reefs (reefs that do not break the sea surface) occupy an area equivale...
Susceptibility to human‐driven environmental changes is mediated by species traits. Therefore, identifying traits that predict organism performance, ecosystem function and response to changes in environmental conditions can help forecast how ecosystems are responding to the Anthropocene.
Morphology dictates how organisms interact with their environ...
The Coral Sea lies in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, bordered by Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Tasman Sea. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) constitutes the western margin of the Coral Sea and supports extensive submerged reef systems in mesophotic depths. The majority of research on the GBR has focus...
Changes in abundance across a natural environmental gradient provide important insights into a species’ realized ecological niche. In reef‐building corals, a species’ niche is often defined using its depth range. However, most reef‐building coral species occur over a broad depth range, a fact that is incompatible with the strong zonation found in c...
The ecology of habitats along the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) shelf-break has rarely been investigated. Thus, there is little understanding of how associated fishes interact with deeper environments. We examined relationships between deep-reef fish communities and benthic habitat structure. We sampled 48 sites over a large depth gradient (54–260 m) in...
Abstract Background Globally, shallow-water coral reef biodiversity is at risk from a variety of threats, some of which may attenuate with depth. Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs), occurring from 30 to 40 m and deeper in tropical locations, have been subject to a surge of research this century. Though a number of valuable narrative reviews exist,...
Escalating climate-related disturbances and asymmetric habitat losses will increasingly result in species living in more marginal habitats. Marginal habitats may represent important refuges if individuals can acquire adequate resources to survive and reproduce. However, resources at range margins are often distributed more sparsely; therefore, incr...
Escalating climate-related disturbances and asymmetric habitat losses will increasingly result in species living in more marginal habitats. Marginal habitats may represent important refuges if individuals can acquire adequate resources to survive and reproduce. However, resources at range margins are often distributed more sparsely; therefore, incr...
During the planning phase the efficacy of different strategies to manage marine resources should ultimately be assessed by their potential impact, or ability to make a difference to ecological and social outcomes. While community‐based and systematic approaches to establishing marine protected areas have their strengths and weaknesses, comparisons...
Zootaxa 4472 (2): 307-326 Abstract Black corals (Anthozoa: Antipatharia) occur in all the world's oceans in a wide range of habitats from shallow-water coral reefs to the deep-sea. However, the taxonomy of black corals is poorly known compared to many other anthozoan groups. This knowledge gap is particularly acute for the deep-sea, where collectin...
The During the planning phase the efficacy of different strategies to manage marine resources should ultimately be assessed by their potential impact, or ability to make a difference to ecological and social outcomes. While community‐based and systematic approaches to establishing marine protected areas have their strengths and weaknesses, comparis...
Coral bleaching events have caused extensive mortality on reefs around the world. Juvenile corals are generally less affected by bleaching than their conspecific adults and therefore have the potential to buffer population declines and seed recovery. Here, we use juvenile and adult abundance data at 20 sites encircling Lizard Island, Great Barrier...