2020 ACRS Research Awards

Trails of read headlights reveal how busy spawning season is at the AIMS facilities. © Christopher Brunner 2019 ACRS Photo Competition

Each year the ACRS supports the research of up to five students through provision of the ACRS Research Awards. The most outstanding proposals are awarded the Terry Walker Prize ($4,000) or the Danielle Simmons Prize ($4,000). Up to three additional ACRS Research Awards of $2,500 each are also awarded. Below we present you the recipients of the 2020 ACRS Research Awards. In the following pages, you can read articles contributed by each awardee.

Terry Walker Prize

DIONE DEAKER

A bad starfish with a good egg: crown-of-thorns starfish egg energetics and larval development in naturally nutrient poor tropical waters

Resilience to food scarcity and maternal provisioning in eggs may give COTS “the edge” compared to other tropical sea stars, contributing to their high success rates and the development of outbreaks.

Danielle Simmons Prize

JEREMY HOROWITZ

Happening here in Heron: checklist of black coral species, descriptions of undescribed species, and conservation of biodiversity. Oh my!

To identify a coral species, both morphological and molecular evidences are needed because the way corals look can be deceiving. For example, there are black corals at 3 meters depth that look identical to black corals at 3,000 meters depth that actually belong to different families with hundreds of millions of years of separation between them!

ACRS Research Awards

YI-YANG (ALEX) CHEN

From weed to reef fish: Invertebrates living on seaweed power the middle of marine food webs

Understanding and quantifying the energy flows between reef fishes and their prey can help us better predict fishery production and how seaweed meadows will respond to future environmental disturbances.

CATHELINE FROEHLICH

Let’s pull up their genes: Are multiple climatic events affecting the genetic diversity of coral-dwelling fishes?

After four back-to-back cyclones and bleaching events at Lizard Island, few goby species remained and most corals were empty, which is making us wonder: what happened to the genetic diversity of gobies?

FRANCESCO RICCI

Endolithic algae: the coral holobiont’s lungs

The distribution of oxygen produced by algae living inside the coral skeleton appears to be controlled by more than just light. We found that the oxygen measured inside the coral skeleton is very low compared to what would be expected.