James Boon

Density dependent habitat selection in response to habitat loss in a coral reef fish Habitat loss triggers a social chain reaction: adult reef fish crowd onto remaining coral, then spill over onto dead coral—and juveniles follow. This study reveals a novel, socially driven ‘bandwagon...

PAPER hints at ecological traps for damselfish settlement - dead corals chosen for settlement if an adult is present, could cascade to bad ends! besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Led by @lisabe.bsky.social @lec-reefs.bsky.social @animalecology.bsky.social

Indian women used to be afraid of the ocean. Now, they’re turning into its strongest defenders Along India’s coastline, a rising wave of women is healing our oceans, moving beyond the margins of shore-bound roles traditionally ascribed to them

@ruchakarkarey.bsky.social is in Vogue India! Great article about India's women marine defenders www.vogue.in/content/once...

Assessment of trawling impacts on 10 Vulnerable Marine Ecosystem indicator taxa (e.g. cold-water corals) across New Zealand waters show that 30 years of trawling reduced VME area by 20.8 %, with losses up to 40.7 % in some bioregions.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Deeper Caribbean reef fish communities show greater taxonomic and functional change in dominance structure over a nine-year period - Coral Reefs Fish communities at greater depths on a reef are thought to be less affected by disturbances that more strongly impact shallower areas. As a result, these deeper communities might be expected to show ...

New PAPER shows greater depths NOT correlated with more stable communities on Caribbean reefs, contrary to expectations. Led by @jamesboon.bsky.social link.springer.com/article/10.1... @lec-reefs.bsky.social @envisiondtp.bsky.social @opwallscience.bsky.social

Site-level variation in field of view is associated with altered anti-predator responses in farming damselfish The structure of a habitat affects how animals respond to predators. By recording the anti-predator behaviour of reef fish at sites with different levels o

Field of view affects damselfish anti-predator responses BUT other metrics of structural complexity do not. Implications for how we measure structure & predict its effects academic.oup.com/beheco/advan...
@jamesboon.bsky.social is on fire today! @lec-reefs.bsky.social @envisiondtp.bsky.social

Familiarity mediated by body size predicts intraspecific aggression in farming damselfishes - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology Abstract Aggressive territoriality can have significant benefits for resource acquisition yet is a costly behaviour. Selection should therefore favour mechanisms that allow individuals to modify their...

Third paper from my PhD at @lancasteruni.bsky.social out now. Territorial farming damselfish are more aggressive to smaller neighbours than strangers @envisiondtp.bsky.social #fishinbottles #angrydamsels #nastyneighbours

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Composite image of the Proceedings B journal title, the manuscript title and the author list, alongside an image of a red-footed booby flying amongst palm trees. Some text reads: "Winds shape the behavioural decisions of red-footed boobies, impacting their foraging commutes and feeding behaviour".

"Commuting in crosswinds and foraging in fast winds: the foraging ecology of a flying fish specialist" 💨🐦🐟

New @iomarinescience.bsky.social research out now in @royalsocietypublishing.org: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

📸 @robinfreeman.bsky.social

🧪🌍🪶

@sharkconservationfund @canbiocanarias @saveourseasfoundation @oceantrackingnetwork @wwfnederland @nercscience @deutsche_elasmobrancier_ges

#Angelsharks may be more vulnerable to #ClimateChange than we thought!

Out today in @globalchangebio.bsky.social:
doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

@lancasteruni.bsky.social @zslofficial.bsky.social @ulpgc.es @qmul.bsky.social @leibniz-gemeinschaft.de @lec-reefs.bsky.social

📸 @nuno_vasco_rodrigues

Thrilled to be part of this new paper led by Mayukh Dey & Nature Conservation Foundation, summarizing 25 yrs of 🪸 reef resilience monitoring in Lakshadweep 🏝️ 🇮🇳

We find distinct recovery archetypes shaped by atoll location & coral assemblages

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New paper out in Proceedings B! 🔊

Seabirds' impacts on reefs extends even to some of its tiniest inhabitants - cryptobenthic reef fishes 🐠
Near colonies, these fishes assimilate seabird nutrients (💩), grow larger 📈 & more at: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

@royalsocietypublishing.org

Marine Degradation and Market Dependency in Ghana: Food Sovereignty as a Critique of Capital in Aquatic Food Systems Small-scale fisheries constitute a vital source of food for millions of people, despite facing increasing marginalisation. Food sovereignty is a global social movement that calls attention to the mar...

🐟 My PhD's 2nd chapter is now published! Here I show how industrial overfishing in Ghanaian waters exacerbates inequalities in the post-harvest sector, impacting fish processing and trading livelihoods, as well as Ghanaian aquatic food systems more broadly. 🐟

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Deadline FRIDAY! New postdoc position on pelagic reef subsidies. @lancasteruni.bsky.social & @lec-reefs.bsky.social

Tell your friends 😎 🦑🧪🌊🌍

Britain has a new snake species – should climate change mean it is allowed to stay? This species could be the poster child for conservation on a warming planet.

tinyurl.com/4fnsbuck
@uk.theconversation.com piece on our recent paper on the Aesculapian snake in N. Wales, where we ask how Anthropocene realities should change the way we think about non-native species just North of the native range.
#herpetology #IntroducedSpecies @bangoruniversity.bsky.social

a group of people are dancing in a hallway with a sign that says white water rafting Alt: a group of people are dancing in a hallway with a sign that says white water rafting

A commentary piece from me to you (...if you're an #ethologist / #BehaviouralEcologist) link.springer.com/article/10.1... #Macrobehaviour needs you! @asab.org @biorxiv-behav.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @abcmicrogrants.bsky.social @besmacro.bsky.social

Scheme for developers to boost nature ‘failing’ in first year, campaigners warn The amount of land delivering ‘biodiversity net gain’ linked to developments is falling well short of expectations, research suggests.

In its first year, the Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) scheme has failed to deliver even half the of the Government’s minimum expected habitat creation, finds new @wclnews.bsky.social research.

In 2025, BNG must start delivering on its nature boosting potential🌍

www.independent.co.uk/climate-chan...

Coral Reef in the Ras Mohanned Marine Park, Egypt. Credit: Alex Mustard / Ocean Image Bank

NEW JOB: How does pelagic-reef connectivity vary across atolls and oceans?

2 year post-doc position based at research-intensive @lancasteruni.bsky.social, and part of the fantastic @lec-reefs.bsky.social team

Apply: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

#AcademicSky 🦑 🧪 🌊 🌍

Cheers Bryce!!!!!

Fish diversity has changed dramatically on the Great Barrier Reef The team found that the diversity of fish communities across the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have changed dramatically since the 1990s.

Fish diversity has changed dramatically on the Great Barrier Reef @earthdotcom.bsky.social

www.earth.com/news/fish-di...

Illuminating the multidimensional contributions of small-scale fisheries - Nature A study aimed at revealing the role of small-scale fisheries in sustainable development shows they provide at least 40% of the global fishing catch and affect the livelihoods of 1 in 12 people in the ...

Small-scale fisheries account for 40% of global catch, providing 20% of micronutrient intakes for up to 2.3 billion people and livelihoods for 1 in 12 people.

Huge effort involving @fao.org & 800 experts, out now in @nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Life in the '90s: Barrier Reef biodiversity has 'shifted significantly' - Oceanographic Fish communities living on the Great Barrier Reef today are "substantially different" to those that lived there in the 1990s, new study finds

Another coveage by oceanographic magazine:

"Life in the '90s: Barrier Reef biodiversity has 'shifted significantly'"

oceanographicmagazine.com/news/life-in...

Emergent patterns of reef fish diversity correlate with coral assemblage shifts along the Great Barrier Reef - Nature Communications Coral reefs have been severely affected by anthropogenic stress. Using long term data from the Great Barrier Reef, this study found temporal changes in the latitudinal diversity gradient, and stronger...

Great Barrier Reef fish reveal that large-scale macroecological patterns have changed significantly 🐟🐠

We found that changes in latitudinal diversity gradient & rising species turnover were strongly correlated with shifts in coral composition

Out now in Nature Comms www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Warming stripes for 1850-2024, changing from blues to reds as the world rapidly warms up

The data is in. 2024 was the warmest year on record, and probably in the whole of human history – about 1.6°C warmer than the pre-industrial period.

More than 1 billion individual thermometer measurements, made by thousands of people over many decades, have been condensed into a single number.

Diagram showing links between seabirds and various coral-reef monitoring outcomes.

Check out our new paper!

We compare indicators for monitoring the impacts of island restoration on coral reefs. Massive thanks to our huge list of collaborators, which enabled us to look at seabirds, nutrients, microbes, algae, corals, and fish! 🐦🦠🌱🪸🐠

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A bit late but excited to share our new paper exploring how seabird nutrient inputs influence mangrove food webs! 🐦🌿 @entropie-marinelab.bsky.social @lec-reefs.bsky.social @iomarinescience.bsky.social
Open access: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Linking Foraging Behaviour and Habitat Preferences During Moult Across Multiple Populations of Red‐Throated Diver We demonstrate a link between foraging habitat and behaviour in an elusive aquatic bird, the red-throated diver (Gavia stellata) across three populations (Finland, Iceland and Scotland) during their ....

Feather stable isotopes & dive data reveal links between habitat use & foraging behaviour across 3 populations of red-throated diver during their moult 🪶🌊

Out now in Ecology & Evolution: dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3...

Increased resilience and a regime shift reversal through repeat mass coral bleaching Assessing coral reefs across the inner Seychelles islands, using a 28-year dataset, we document faster coral recovery from the 2016 than the 1998 marine heatwave events. Further, a reef that had regi....

Still hope for coral reefs. Using 28-years of data in Seychelles, we find reefs recovering 4-5 years faster from the 2016 bleaching event, than they did after 1998. Also, a reef that had regime-shifted to macroalgae for over 15 years, is recovering to coral.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

#PhD opportunity on "Decoding biological colour: leveraging AI to analyse big data on animal images in a changing world" with me, @chris-nemeth.bsky.social Chris Cooney (U Sheff) & David Roy (UKCEH) thru new @exageo-dla.bsky.social based at Lancaster Uni www.exageo.org/phd-student-...

A shocking new report out today by @wildjustice.bsky.social @kierachapman.bsky.social @malcolmtait.bsky.social & Sarah Postlethwaite finds ONLY 53% of on-site #environmental measures legally secured through the development process are delivered in reality. Read the summary here: bit.ly/4iw5iji

What is a unit of nature? Measurement challenges in the emerging biodiversity credit market | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Bending the curve of biodiversity loss requires the business and financial sectors to disclose and reduce their biodiversity impacts and help fund nature recovery. This has sparked interest in developing generalizable, standardized measurements of ...

Are you interested in Biodiversity Credits? Read the inaugral Georgina Mace Review in @royalsociety.org: 'What is a unit of nature? Measurement challenges in the emerging biodiversity credit market' out today.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

📢New Paper Alert📢 (and first chapter of my PhD!)

We show that scale matters when quantifying motile cryptofauna on tropical coral reefs 🦀

Paper in MEPS: www.int-res.com/abstracts/me...