[Coral-List] What eats Diadema?

Longin Kaczmarsky solonnie at hotmail.com
Sun Jan 10 14:31:14 EST 2010


Hi John,

    I remember seeing on a few occassions, at night, Triton's trumpet snails apparently eating urchins, including Diadema. West Indian sea stars, Oreaster, eat them as well.

                         Lonnie Kaczmarsky
 
> From: jbruno at unc.edu
> Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 08:25:36 -0500
> To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
> Subject: [Coral-List] What eats Diadema?
> 
> There was an interesting email thread about Diadema predators that went around among a group of 20 or so reef ecologists during the holidays. I just posted some of the highlights from the discussion and also some information on what eats Diadema from the classic Randall et al (1964) study of the biology of Diadema at ClimateShifts: http://www.climateshifts.org/?p=4188
> 
> (It is sad how many of these discussions take place online, but off of the coral list and are thus not archived and the collective knowledge in them is not widely disseminated)
> 
> Predators of Diadema appear to include: snapper, jacks, porcupinefishes, trunkfishes, grunts including black margate, porgies, triggerfishes, pufferfish, large wrasses, parrotfish, octopuses, lobsters, large gastropods and even small crabs (which eat juvenile Diadema).
> 
> Does anyone have further information or observation on Diadema predators that they'd be willing to share with the coral list or as a comment on Climate Shifts?
> 
> jb
> 
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