麻豆影院

A $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow CU 麻豆影院 researchers to better understand how complex species interactions affect natural ecosystems

麻豆影院 marine biologist Mike Gil says, half-jokingly, that a major part of his research is 鈥渟pying on fish in coral reefs, 鈥楤ig Brother/1984-style.鈥欌��

Now, thanks to a recent $3 million grant from the National Sciences Foundation (NSF), he and researchers from three partnering universities will be able to do that in a really big way.听

鈥淚 was pleasantly surprised and extremely excited when I first got word that we were successful in our attempt to secure this funding,鈥� says Gil, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who led the grant proposal. He says the funding is important because there is much that researchers still don鈥檛 understand when it comes to the workings of natural ecosystems鈥攅specially coral reefs.

鈥淲e鈥檙e at the tip of the iceberg, at best,鈥� he says. 鈥淗ow does this system behave? How is it going to respond to a disturbance, like human-driven environmental change? For those kinds of questions, we have incredible room to expand our knowledge base.鈥�

In an attempt to answer those questions, the team of researchers has selected coral reefs in the Caribbean, French Polynesia and Southeast Asia for intensive monitoring and experimentation. The seafloor around large sections of those reefs will be surrounded by an array of video cameras to capture the behavior of mixed-species groups of herbivorous fish as they move around the reef.听

鈥淲e aim to achieve a contiguous field of view, and to minimize blind spots over a spatial scale of observation that has never been attempted before. Big Brother is going to be watching鈥攂ut this time, it will be fish,鈥� Gil says with a laugh. 鈥淲ith this approach, we will collect an unprecedented data set on the individual behaviors of these fish. We can then use these data to tease out specific types of interactions among species.鈥�

By studying coral reef ecosystems in different parts of the world, the researchers can identify and quantify similarities and differences, to potentially extract robust patterns across global scales, according to Gil, who adds that this research project is the largest of its kind to date.

鈥淲e certainly could benefit tremendously from having way, way more data on how species interact in the wild, and this project will contribute meaningfully to this need,鈥� he says.

Coral reefs & 鈥楾he Rules of Life鈥�

Findings from this research will extend far beyond coral reef ecosystems, Gil says, offering insights on how nature broadly works, or the 鈥淩ules of Life,鈥� as defined by the NSF.

Gil explains that, in order to create models of ecosystems, which are designed to make important long-term predictions, scientists have typically simplified biological interactions by classifying them as听either negative (e.g., competitors vying for resources) or positive (e.g., cells sharing resources).听

However, he notes that in nature, many different interactions occur simultaneously, such as听bacteria exchanging genes conferring antibiotic resistance while competing for limiting nutrients, or trees sharing carbon through their root networks while competing for light and water. How such 鈥渄ynamic interactions鈥� affect the greater ecosystem remains a mystery.

鈥淲e propose to tackle this complexity head on, by building these dynamic species interactions directly into ecosystem models. To do this, we need to rigorously observe these interactions in systems known to have a lot of dynamism and variability in how pairs of species interact鈥攁nd, it turns out, tropical coral reef fish are a great model system for this,鈥� Gil says.

He adds that the scope of what the researchers are attempting to categorize and analyze is massive, which is why CU 麻豆影院 is partnering on the research project with mathematical biologists, computer scientists and others from Florida Atlantic University, Cornell University and the University of New Mexico.听

鈥淲e鈥檙e going to go out and rigorously collect boatloads of data on fish behavior and interactions,鈥� says Gil, all in the hopes of figuring out how those species interactions affect the greater ecosystem.

He says that researchers will use detailed modeling to simulate how real-world, human-driven disturbances, like pollution, overfishing or climate change can affect coral reef fish populations and coral reef ecosystems at large.

听鈥淲e are excited by what this deeper understanding of species interactions could teach us about conservation,鈥� says Gil. 鈥淭his project can give us a more accurate understanding of how ecosystems like coral reefs and beyond are going to respond to environmental changes and disturbances largely brought on by human activities.鈥�