Better late than never – some lab highlights from 2017:

A paper dedicated to our dear friend and colleague Glenn Almany tracking larval dispersal of two species of coral reef fishes in Papua New Guinea:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0148

Feature article in Marine Ecology Progress Series from Greg Skomal and our lab describing movements of white sharks in the North Atlantic, documenting remarkable coastal and oceanic migrations of adults:

http://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m580p001.pdf

New research using stable isotopes of amino acids to track the movements of penguins across ocean basins around Antartica from Michael Polito and co-authors:

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/13/8/20170241

And finally a return to otolith geochemistry and an application tracking the movement of smallmouth bass in a Virginia river by Robert Humston and co-authors:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jfb.13073

Some publication highlights from the lab in 2016:

The first genealogy for a wild marine fish population by Océane Salles and wo-workers published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

http://www.pnas.org/content/113/46/13245.full?sid=249a045b-473e-421a-ab08-bd4ca52f7795

Description of the population structure of a whale shark aggregation that we discovered in the Saudi Red Sea by Jesse Cochrane and colleagues published in the Journal of Fish Biology

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfb.13054/full

Estimates of regional variation in otolith geochemistry of juvenile Atlantic cod from Newfoundland published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences by Ryan Stanley and co-authors

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/cjfas-2015-0353

And the first visualization of coral reef food webs using stable carbon isotopes in essential amino acids published in Oecologia by Kelton McMahon and colleagues, including a great cover shot by Tane Sinclair-Taylor

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-015-3475-3/fulltext.html

A new study, led by Prof. Pablo Saenz-Agudelo at the Austral University of Chile, reveals the importance of large females, and stable breeding pairs, to a population of panda clownfish (Amphiprion polymnus) in Bootless Bay, Papua New Guinea. Newly-settled juveniles were assigned to parents in the focal population using DNA parentage analysis. We found that large females do indeed contribute disproportionately to local population replenishment, providing further support for efforts to protect large females within fished populations. And interestingly, stable breeding pairs were also more successful than new pairs in which the original male had died. Read more here:

Photo Serge Planes

http://goo.gl/c3qczo

Just out, a new paper from the Fish Ecology Lab and collaborators describing a new aggregation site for juvenile whale sharks in the southern Red Sea.  Interestingly, the sex ratios of the sharks we encountered was approximately 1:1, unlike all other aggregation sites that are dominated by males.  We don’t understand the significance of the relatively high numbers of juvenile females in the Red Sea aggregation yet, but it does highlight the potential importance of this site to whale shark populations in the Indian Ocean and possibly beyond.  Check out the paper (open access at PLoS ONE) using the URL below:

goo.gl/RmYKF1

The WHOI press release accompanying the article is here:

goo.gl/YsZAR6

Photo: Nuno Sá

A new paper from the Fish Ecology Lab and collaborators has documented the remarkable diving abilities of Chilean devil rays (Mobula tarapacana) in the central North Atlantic.  Dive profiles revealed that the rays are diving to depths of almost 2 km where they are encountering water temperatures as low as 3 degrees C. The rays were instrumented with pop-up satellite archival transmitting (PSAT) tags on Princess Alice seamount in the Azores. While definitive evidence is lacking, we assume that the rays are diving to forage on meso- and bathypelagic fishes that are abundance at depth in the central North Atlantic.  Check out the paper (open access) here:

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140701/ncomms5274/full/ncomms5274.html