A list of publications related to each project can be found
at the bottom of their pages
DEEP-SEA FISH
ECOLOGY LAB
Understanding the role that an organism plays in a community necessarily includes knowledge of what it eats, whether its prey change in time or space, and how much matter and energy individuals and populations consume. This species level information can in turn be integrated to form food webs that can organize our understanding of ecosystem function. Our research has focused on what deep-sea fishes eat, their role as scavengers, top predators, or a forage base for even larger animals such as tunas and swordfish. We are very interested in how deep sea animals and food webs are connected to shallow water systems where most primary production occurs. READ MORE
Ecological energetics is the study of the flow of energy through individuals and populations. When an organism consumes a meal, some of the matter and energy are assimilated into the animal and used for maintenance, growth or reproduction. Some of the matter and energy are lost through excretion. By understanding these processes in the individual they can be extrapolated up to a whole population and used to understand the production of fish (for fisheries) or to construct food-web models for whole communities. READ MORE
The deep sea is the least explored environment on the planet and within it the hadal zone is clearly the last frontier. It is comprised of ~37 deep ocean trenches and troughs (6000 to 11,000 meters or 3.7 to 6.8 miles), and it represents the deepest marine habitat on Earth, accounting for the deepest 45% of the global ocean. Because of the immense technological challenges of working at these depths most studies were very limited. With the advent of state of the art submersibles and remotely operated vehicles we are part of a new era of hadal science. Our work investigates the distributions of hadal animals in relation to depth, food and other variables and also seeks to work out the trophic relationships of hadal food webs. HADal Ecosystems Studies (HADES)
Fisheries expanded into deep waters globally in the 1970s and have expanded dramatically in the following decades, often in advance of the scientific knowledge required to manage them successfully. In Hawaii a deep water fishery (100-400m) has existed for fish such as opakapaka and ehu for quite some time. We are involved in studies of bottomfish restricted fishing areas (BRFAs) that were established in the State in 2007 (in their current form) to determine if they are effective in rebuilding populations within them and in neighboring areas outside their boundaries. READ MORE
Last updated 02/14/14
DEEP-SEA FISH
ECOLOGY LAB