shapes and flamboyant colors. However, they are also
under threat from the effects of climate change, pollution, and disease.
The first-draft assembly of the Acropora millepora sequence is available to the scientific community under
specific conditions.
SOURCE
From materials released by ARC Centre of Excellence for
Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University, Townsville,
Queensland, Australia.
Modern Reef Fish:
Live Fast, Die Young
Fish communities in the twenty-first
century are living faster and dying
smaller than they did in earlier times.
That’s the main finding of a recent
study by researchers from the Wildlife
Conservation Society who compared
fish recently caught in coastal Kenya
with the bones of fish contained in
ancient Swahili refuse heaps in order
to understand how to rebuild the current fisheries.
Of course, modern fish communities are not victims of reckless living
but of over-fishing, which has caused
an ecosystem-level transition that
may not be easily reversible, according to the study. Over the centuries,
human fishing has greatly reduced
or eliminated larger and longer-lived
species that were commonly caught
in the Middle Ages. The remaining
fish communities today contain more
species with shorter life spans, faster
growth rates, smaller average sizes,
and fewer top predators.
The study, which utilized more
than 5,475 samples of ancient fish
remains dating between 1,250 and
600 years before the present time
(approximately AD 750—1400), appears in the current online edition of
the journal Conservation Biology. The
authors are Tim R. McClanahan and
Johnstone O. Omukoto of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
“The ancient Swahili middens
represent a time capsule of data, con-
taining information on the composi-
tion of the region’s fish assemblages
and how human communities influ-
enced the marine environment,” said
McClanahan, WCS Senior Conserva-
tionist and head of the WCS’s coral reef research and
conservation program. “The historical data suggest that
fishing removes the slower-growing, longer-lived species
over time and that marine protected areas are only par-
tially successful in recovering the fish communities of
the past.”
Seeking to examine how fish populations are impact-
ed by increasing fishing pressure over time, McClana-
han and Omukoto compared data on the life histories
of modern fish communities (gathered from fish caught
in both heavily fished sites and protected closures on the
Kenyan coast) with data gathered from fish remains ex-
cavated from an ancient Swahili settlement located in
