An international team of researchers, including several from the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa, has quantified five critical ecological processes on more than 500 coral reefs worldwide to understand how these processes relate to each other, what may distinguish the most functional reefs, and what that means for our management of reef functioning. Their work, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, demonstrates that five key functions performed by fish communities–the removal of algae, predation, biomass production, and the cycling of nitrogen and phosphorus– are inherently interconnected. As such, while the performance of these processes is influenced by the community structure of reef fishes on any given reef, no reef can maximize each of the five processes simultaneously. ...
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