[Coral-List] For graduate and undergraduate coral reef scientists

Sun Nov 8 00:17:05 UTC 2020

Gene Shinn's ≈1 ton of scientific reprints heading to Mount Trashmore is a
significant loss. We need a coral reef Project Gutenberg to stop this
happening. Scanning and saving it to ReefBase would have been a big job but
a no-brainer investment in terms of ROI. Unfortunately we will run into
copyright problems making it all universally accessible.
Respect to all the forward-thinking libraries and non-profit organisations
who *are* taking on such projects.

On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 9:15 PM Alina Szmant via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

> Apropos seminal papers that every wanna-be coral reef ecologist and
> physiological ecologist should have read, I want to recommend the following
> paper
>
> Howard T. Odum and Eugene P. Odum, 1955: Trophic Structure and
> Productivity of a Windward Coral Reef Community on Eniwetok Atoll
> Ecological Monographs Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jul., 1955), pp. 291-320 (30 pages)
> Published By: Wiley
> DOI: 10.2307/1943285
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/1943285
>
> I used to have my coral reef ecology students read this paper at the end
> of the semester when hopefully they had a better grasp of much of the more
> recent literature and the variety of topics covered in my course. A final
> exam question I used was what topics/questions addressed by the Odum
> brothers had been updated with further study, which results stood the test
> of time, and which were overturned by investigation using more modern
> techniques than they had available to them. There are few aspects of coral
> reef ecology the young Odums didn't address in this monograph after
> spending two months living on Eniwetak. I happened to get to know Howard
> when he lived in PR during the radiation study they did in El Verde during
> the 1960s. Brilliant man and he also taught me how to understand football
> (his son and my brother went to the same school).
>
> Alina
>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Coral-List <coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> On Behalf Of
> Tomas via Coral-List
> Sent: Friday, November 6, 2020 2:54 PM
> To: David Blakeway <fathom5marineresearch at gmail.com>
> Cc: coral list <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] For graduate and undergraduate coral reef
> scientists
>
> I appreciate the comments made by David regarding the value of historical
> literature. I was fortunate enough to work on a project in Indonesia that
> gave me an opportunity to dig into historical literature, and it was a
> revelation to find just how much has been shelved and forgotten. David’s
> comment about the Dutch scientists is a good example.
> I was actually able to use Vervey (1931) Secchi disk data (converted to
> K) to demonstrate a strong relationship between turbidity and the maximum
> depth of the living reef, which suggested that the maximum depth of the
> functional coral reef community was significantly reduced since 1929. It
> was the historical information from the 1920s that made it possible to
> theorize that the decline of the coral reefs in Jakarta Bay was linked to
> eutrophication. The study was presented at:
>
> Ginsburg, R. N. (Compiler), 1994. Proceeding of the Colloquium on Global
> Aspects of Coral Reefs” Health, Hazards and History, 1993. Rosenstiel
> School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami.
>
> Too bad that Bob Ginsburg’s compilation is not more widely accessible to
> the scientific coral reef community. Perhaps RSMAS can do something about
> it?
>
> Anyone interested in the Jakarta Bay coral reef paper can access it
> through:
>
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284877475_Case_histories_a_historical_perspective_of_the_natural_and_anthropogenic_impacts_in_the_Indonesian_Archipelago_with_a_focus_on_the_Kepulauan_Seribu_Java_Sea_Colloquium_on_Global_Aspects_of_Coral_Reefs?_sg=3jYI1H-EbDHabny5xg31uSxkTvvmOibyQLy-pIx0FBeqBSMrk2jN9vftKelciu0U4pVYMArbgIm6w-nFTyF7VrO5458a-uIXxgfHWmn-.mXCOHFn0uNC2czXM3IulYESvxSBmokzafcaDWeQBJ_wKlZmVK9ztCLt-1EHuUNocttM9dj4sL5501GnDVKHQnQ
>
> To follow up on David’s comments about coral reefs in turbid environments
> I would like to suggest to anyone who is interested to work on coral
> communities in marginal environments to have a look at Bangladesh. Located
> about 200 km south of the largest river delta in the world, the
> Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta) lies Narikel Jinjira (aka St. Martin’s
> Island). This small sedimentary island is surrounded by a rocky reef that
> supports a diverse coral community (66 scleractinian coral species), but no
> carbonate reefal buildup. It is a fascinating place and yet has receives
> very little attention thus far from the international scientific coral reef
> community. There have been recent (and numerous past) papers published on
> the “coral reefs of St. Martin’s Island” yet there are no coral reefs to be
> described. It seems that early studies on coral fragments that were found
> on the beaches of the island created a myth of the “Coral Island”
> surrounded by coral reefs.
> Hopefully more studies that will be published in reputable journals will
> be able to expose and put an end to that myth.
>
> Anyone interested to learn more about Narikel Jinjira can visit:
>
>
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304077895_MANAGEMENT_PLAN_FOR_CORAL_RESOURCES_OF_NARIKEL_JINJIRA_St_Martin's_Island?_sg=FB2VsUS1_7EDQE8lsGYl1aL2iR4ItUsd5m5_VSNo6UQe3F4Ztx85FoxH9bIlL13gM4RGHZH_wVWNZHM-vbpcHc1-8hnBDd8lRf6rX2GK.nP-_0ASFKV0QuSoYukkIVCBEOfgh2rvLpmfQxFaNWPy9LA6Tf3gmeFFwsvlPuFQl36SGHai3VKlPL-QcBN3zkA
>
> Anyone interested to get contacts in Bangladesh to look at collaborative
> projects on Narikal Jinjira please let me know and I can provide you with
> more contact information.
>
> Tom
>
> On 2020-11-06 06:12, David Blakeway via Coral-List wrote:
> > I’d like to follow up on our discussion about the value of historic
> > literature by providing some examples. Actually, I haven’t found any
> > examples of historic literature generating new research, but this is
> > telling because there are plenty that should have. One topic already
> > mentioned by Tomas is coral colonisation and reef development in
> > turbid muddy habitats. It is now known, through research in North
> > Queensland and elsewhere over the last three decades, that coral reefs
> > are growing spectacularly well in such habitats, refuting the
> > clear-water coral reef paradigm. However, in publications through
> > 1890-1931, the Dutch researchers de Sluiter, Umbgrove and Verwey had
> > already completely described the phenomenon, including the inference
> > that corals may be obtaining nutrition from the turbid water.
> >
> > Another example is the recent discovery of coral reef hypoxia and
> > tropical dead zones by Altieri et al. (2017). This is a great piece of
> > work that has sparked multiple research programs. But the field
> > *should* have begun with Verwey (again!, 1931) whose comprehensive
> > reef surveys and lab experiments showed that, in his words: “…*the
> > oxygen consumption of a reef can be so considerable that the water
> > around it may become deprived of a large part of its oxygen.*” and
> > “…*the quantity of oxygen, present in the water, must often be the
> > limiting factor in reef growth*.”
> >
> > I will emphasise here that, although I obviously have an interest in
> > historic coral reef literature, I’ve only read a fraction of it, and
> > nothing in other languages. The obvious inference is that there are
> > many more ground-breaking ideas to be rediscovered and that, at least
> > in older fields such as ecology, *the best way forward is to look
> > back*. There are also clear implications for newer fields; an
> > important one being the recognition that some of today’s ideas will be
> > tomorrow’s undiscovered gems. How do great ideas slip away undetected?
> > No doubt there are several reasons, but I’m pretty sure the present
> > H-index-driven blizzard of publications isn’t helping.
> >
> > For students reading this, especially those interested in reef
> > ecology, I have an agenda in presenting the two examples above and
> > it’s this: in both cases the phenomenon is expressed in reef
> > geomorphology. In the turbid muddy reefs example, these reefs often
> > colonise the seaward edges of sedimentary structures such as delta
> > lobes (see India’s Gulf of Kachchh for some awesome specimens). Deltas
> > are, obviously, turbid muddy environments, and it’s extremely unlikely
> > there’s any hard substrate beneath the reefs because deltas are built
> > of sediment. So straight away, from geomorphology alone, you can
> > deduce that coral reefs are thriving (or at least
> > existing)
> > in turbid water, and that they have colonised unconsolidated sediment,
> > not rock.
> >
> > The hypoxia example is more complex because in this case the reef
> > doesn’t adopt the underlying morphology, it builds the morphology
> > itself. At least that is what I think. You can see my reasoning in
> > this preprint:
> > https://peerj.com/preprints/26794/ (critical feedback appreciated).
> > This
> > self-constructing aspect of reefs is interesting because it
> > potentially allows you to derive aspects of local-scale ecology from
> > large-scale reef geomorphology—reef geomorphology becomes a symbolic
> > language, conveying ecological information. I would love to see young
> > ecologists start decoding this information! If you’re interested, but
> > concerned that you don’t know enough geology, don’t worry. Geological
> > text can be dry and dense, with lots of jargon (like ecology), but
> > conceptually it is not difficult. In fact, perhaps there’s no such
> > thing as coral reef geology, it’s just ecology plus time (just trying
> > to get a bite here :)
> >
> > Altieri AH, Harrison SB, Seemann J, Collin R, Diaz RJ, Knowlton N.
> > 2017.
> > Tropical dead zones and mass mortalities on coral reefs. Proceedings
> > of the National Academy of Sciences. 114:3660–3665.
> > https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1621517114
> >
> > *Verwey*, J, *1931*. *Coral reef* studies. II. The *depth* of *coral
> > reefs* in
> > relation to their *oxygen*. consumption and the penetration of light
> > in water. Treubia, 13(2): 169-198
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