Linking habitat disturbance on reefs to fish color diversity

[pandorasboxfish]

We're starting a new project and I was just curious if the community here had some feedback and observations to contribute.

We're starting a multi-institutional collaboration to try to understand what factors accelerate or place controls on the diversity of fish color over time. There are a lot of hypotheses in the literature going back hundreds of years, but surprisingly, not a lot of work has been done in this area.

One part that I'm really interested in is testing whether colorful coral reef fish are disproportionately effected by things that change turbidity like run-off, dredging, etc. Visual signaling is pretty important for a lot of these species and my own observations seem to suggest a pretty dramatic change in community composition when reefs start to get "murky". Has anyone here noticed similar patterns or have thoughts on this?

To keep things short here, we've got a lot of the details and other info outlined on our pilot-data crowd-source initiative at http://experiment.com/reefs .

I'm excited to hear what you guys think!

 

[tursiops]

You'll probably get more informed responses from a site like

Coral-List Info Page

 

[pandorasboxfish]

Thanks!! Just subscribed and will post there as well.

We know so little about fish color that with all the naturalists, photographers, and scientists lurking on here I was just curious to hear what people have thought about/observed while roaming the reefs.

 

[klausi]

Interesting idea .... I wonder what the time scale of the colorful-fish loss would be? One generation?