Viktor W. Brandtneris

• MSc - University of the Virgin Islands, 2015
• Technical Dive Office Assistant at University of the Virgin Islands

Climate change is radically altering coral reef ecosystems, mainly through increasingly frequent and severe bleaching events. Yet, some reefs have exhibited higher thermal tolerance after bleaching severely the first time. To understand changes in thermal tolerance in the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP), we compiled four decades of temperature, cora...

Coral communities in the Caribbean face a new and deadly threat in the form of the highly virulent multi-host stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD). In late January of 2019, a disease with signs and characteristics matching that of SCTLD was found affecting a reef off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). Identification of it...

Energetic responses of zooxanthellate reef corals along depth gradients have relevance to the refugia potential of mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs). Previous observations suggested that MCEs in the Caribbean are thermally buffered during the warmest parts of the year and occur within or just below the chlorophyll maximum, suggesting abundant trop...

This study examined fluctuations in an eastern Pacific reef fish assemblage as it varied with coral recovery over 30 yr. Concurrent fish and coral monitoring were conducted at Uva Island reef, which lies within the boundaries of Coiba National Park, Panama, in an area that has received virtually no fishing pressure or watershed development over the...

Mesophotic coral ecosystems are extensive light-dependent habitats that typically form between 30 and 150 m depth in the tropical oceans. The forces that structure the benthic communities in these ecosystems are poorly understood but this is rapidly changing with technological advances in technical diving and remote observation that allow large-sca...

The factors that drive fish communities on coral reefs are varied, complex, and often location specific. In the northern United States Virgin Islands, the large areas of mesophotic coral ecosystems across an insular shelf provide a multitude of gradients along which fish communities form. Using a stratified-random visual fish census, we collected c...

A three-year pilot study, the Deep Coral Reef Monitoring Program (DCRMP), expanded the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program’s (NCRMP) established fishery-independent, diver-based reef fish visual survey to upper mesophotic reefs (>30 to 50 m) in the United States (US) Caribbean for the first time. The new DCRMP sample domain (>30 to 50 m) encompa...

Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs) at 30–100 m depth are the dominant hard bottom habitat in the US Virgin Islands of the northeastern Caribbean Sea. Well-developed MCEs surpass the extent of shallow coral reefs by almost a factor of three. These habitats range from high coral cover structural reefs to low coral cover hard bottoms on banks, slopes,...

A comparison of shallow water environments at Flat Cay and Buck Island, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. (PDF)

Two zooxanthellate, scleractinian species present in the equatorial eastern Pacific, Psammocora stellata and Psammocora profundacella, were examined in terms of their reproductive biology and ecology at four study sites, non-upwelling (Can˜o Island, Costa Rica, and Uva Island, Panama´), upwelling (Gulf of Panama´, Panama´), and seasonally varying t...

Coral reef cryptofauna, which live hidden within reef framework structures, are considered to be the most diverse group of coral reef metazoans. They likely comprise more biomass than all surface fauna, providing food sources for fishes and playing important roles as predators, herbivores, detritivores, filter feeders, and scavengers. In an era of...