Bayesian

Marine invertebrates metabolism

Developing statistical tools to understand the metabolic rates of marine invertebrates.

Reef fish macroecology and evolution

Reef fish ecology and evolution at broad scales.

Scaling

Linking biological levels of organisation through energetics.

Do low oxygen environments facilitate marine invasions? Relative tolerance of native and invasive species to low oxygen conditions

Biological invasions are one of the biggest threats to global biodiversity. Marine artificial structures are proliferating worldwide and provide a haven for marine invasive species. Such structures disrupt local hydrodynamics, which can lead to the formation of oxygen-depleted microsites...

Temperature effects on mass-scaling exponents in colonial animals: a manipulative test

Body size and temperature are fundamental drivers of ecological processes because they determine metabolic rates at the individual level. Whether these drivers act independently on individual-level metabolic rates remains uncertain. Most studies of intraspecific scaling of unitary organisms must rely on preexisting differences in size to examine its relationship with metabolic rate, thereby potentially confounding size-correlated traits (e.g., age, nutrition) with size, which can affect metabolic rate...

Energetic and ecological constraints on population density of reef fishes

Population ecology has classically focused on pairwise species interactions, hindering the description of general patterns and processes of population abundance at large spatial scales. Here we use the metabolic theory of ecology as a framework to formulate and test a model that yields predictions linking population density to the physiological constraints of body size and temperature on individual metabolism, and the ecological constraints of trophic structure and species richness on energy partitioning among species...

Abundance, diet, foraging and nutritional condition of the banded butterflyfish (*Chaetodon striatus*) along the western Atlantic

The feeding behaviour and diet plasticity of a given species are usually shaped by the relationship between species physiology and the quality and availability of resources in the environment. As such, some species may achieve wide geographical distributions by utilizing multiple resources at different sites within their ranges. We studied the distribution and feeding of *Chaetodon striatus*...

Diet and diversification in the evolution of coral reef fishes

The disparity in species richness among evolutionary lineages is one of the oldest and most intriguing issues in evolutionary biology. Although geographical factors have been traditionally thought to promote speciation, recent studies have underscored the importance of ecological interactions as one of the main drivers of diversification. Here, we test if differences in species richness of closely related lineages match predictions based on the concept of density-dependent diversification...

Scaling metabolism from individuals to reef-fish communities at broad spatial scales

Fishes contribute substantially to energy and nutrient fluxes in reef ecosystems, but quantifying these roles is challenging. Here, we do so by synthesising a large compilation of fish metabolic-rate data with a comprehensive database on reef-fish community abundance and biomass...