Comment on “Chemically Mediated Behavior of Recruiting Corals and Fishes: A Tipping Point That May Limit Reef Recovery”

Authors

Andrew H. Baird, James Cook University - Townsville, Australia
Vivian R. Cumbo, James Cook University - Townsville, Australia
Joana Figueiredo, Nova Southeastern UniversityFollow
Saki Harii, University of the Ryukyus - Japan
Tom Hata, Stanford University
Joshua S. Madin, Macquarie University - Sydney, Australia

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-21-2014

Publication Title

PeerJ

Keywords

Coral reefs, Larval ecology, Larval behavior

ISSN

2167-8359

Volume

2

Issue/No.

e628v1

First Page

1

Last Page

7

Abstract

Dixson et al. (2014) report that coral larvae navigate towards chemical cues associated with healthy reefs and avoid cues from degraded reefs. However, the swimming capabilities of coral larvae and well-established patterns of recruitment and reef hydrodynamics indicate that coral larvae will not be able to use these cues to recruit to healthy reefs. Perfuming degraded reefs, as suggested by Dixson et al (2014), will not enhance recovery rather it will distract from the difficult task of reducing fishing effort and improving water quality.

Comments

©2014 Baird et al.

Additional Comments

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

NSUWorks Citation

Andrew H. Baird, Vivian R. Cumbo, Joana Figueiredo, Saki Harii, Tom Hata, and Joshua S. Madin. 2014. Comment on “Chemically Mediated Behavior of Recruiting Corals and Fishes: A Tipping Point That May Limit Reef Recovery” .PeerJ , (e628v1) : 1 -7. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/occ_facarticles/557.

DOI

10.7287/peerj.preprints.628v1