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

Fri Nov 6 23:07:54 UTC 2020

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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