Author: Craig Osenberg

Jing’s paper in Ecosphere is out!

Jing’s paper on movement and its effect on trophic cascades inside marine protected areas was just published online in Ecosphere. Abstract The protection of predators inside marine reserves is expected to generate trophic cascades with predator density increasing but prey density decreasing; however, predators and prey often both increase inside reserves. This mismatch between the Read More …

Mass mortality of C. maximum in French Polynesia — Update

In July 2015 we observed a mass mortality event of our focal study organism, Cereasignum (previously Dendropoma) maximum in Moorea, French Polynesia.  We have now completed surveys on other islands and have observed NO survivors on any islands in the Societies or Tuamotus: i.e., Mo’orea, Tahiti, Huahine, Raiatea, Taha’a, Bora Bora, Tikehau, Rangiroa, or Fakarava.  Read More …

Adrian is headed to UCSB!

Adrian Stier has accepted a faculty position at UC Santa Barbara [he completed his PhD in the Osenberg lab in 2012 and went on to post-docs at UBC, NCEAS/NOAA, and UW].  He starts this fall in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology.  Congratulations Adrian!

Enrichment scale is out at Oecologia

Our “scale of enrichment” paper was published online recently in Oecologia (it also was picked up by a Huffington Post blogger), which shows that small-scale experiments may overestimate the ability of herbivores to control algal blooms that result from nutrient enrichment.  Congratulations to Mike and Jing!

Congratulations to Dr. Mike Gil!

Mike successfully defended his dissertation (Context dependence in effects of nutrient enrichment on tropical coral reefs) on Oct 8th to the accolades of his PhD committee (thanks to Suzie Mills, Rob Fletcher, Gustav Paulay, Brian Silliman, and Tom Frazer for all of their support and insight).  Mike will be teaching a field course in Marine Read More …

Meta-analysis course in Faro, Portugal

Joachim Claudet (CNRS) and Craig taught another version of their meta-analysis class (Introduction to Meta-analysis in Ecology) this summer.  We were hosted by CCMAR (Universidade do Algarve; Barbara H. Costa and Karim Erzini) and had a great group of students (see the class photo).  We usually teach the course with Fio Micheli (Stanford Univ.), but Read More …

MPA Assessment

A new book on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) edited by Joachim Claudet is now available from Cambridge University Press. In chapter 7 of this book, we explore the evaluation of MPAs using different impact assessment designs (Control-Impact, Before-After-Control-Impact, and Before-After-Control-Impact-Paired-Series) as well as the possibility of covarying effects of biogenic habitat and fish populations in affecting estimates of Read More …

Ocean Bridges

Our Ocean Bridges program (funded by the French-American Cultural Exchange’s Partnership University Fund) has been a very successful collaboration between UF (Craig Osenberg’s and Gustav Paulay’s labs) and CRIOBE/University of Perpignan (Suzie Mills’, Serge Planes’, and Rene Galzin’s labs).  In recent years, we worked on a symbiosis between coral and its crustacean inhabitants. Pocillopora is a common Read More …