[Coral-List] Caribbean angelfish attacking sponges

[Pawlik, Joseph]

Greetings coral-list,

You may be interested in watching an amazing video of French and Grey angelfishes attacking and eating sponges on a coral reef in the Florida Keys.  The video is here:
http://youtu.be/lgPuNMJdgrk
(Lower resolution than the HD it was recorded in, but still OK).
Be sure to turn up you speakers and watch the bait-ball come in at the end!

This video compliments our recent publication in PLOS ONE that shows that sponge communities on Caribbean coral reefs are primarily influenced by top-down effects - specifically predation by angelfishes.  You can access the paper for free here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0062573
In brief, angelfishes focus their feeding on sponge species that are not chemically defended.  These sponge species grow or reproduce faster than the defended species (an example of a resource trade-off), so they persist on the reef despite being the target of predation.  There's a synthesis paper in BioScience at this link:
http://people.uncw.edu/pawlikj/2011BioSciencePawlik.pdf

Regards,

Joe

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Joseph R. Pawlik, Professor
UNCW Center for Marine Science
5600 Marvin K Moss Lane
Wilmington, NC  28409   USA
pawlikj at uncw.edu<mailto:pawlikj at uncw.edu>; Office:(910)962-2377; Cell:(910)232-3579
Website: http://people.uncw.edu/pawlikj/index.html
PDFs: http://people.uncw.edu/pawlikj/pubs2.html
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