Effective monitoring of crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) populations and coral cover is critical for informing management of COTS outbreaks throughout their tropical Indo-Pacific range, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. However, existing monitoring tools such as manta tow and cull diver surveys have well-known limitations including accuracy and resource demands. This study evaluates a range of monitoring tools for asses...

Crown-of-thorns seastar (CoTS, Acanthaster cf. solaris ) outbreaks remain a significant cause of coral loss on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and across the West-Pacific Ocean. Previous outbreaks on the GBR have only been discovered once fully established, which constrains opportunities for effective control. Early detection of outbreaks would provide an important opportunity for early intervention and increase understanding of...

Aim After environmental disasters, species with large population losses may need urgent protection to prevent extinction and support recovery. Following the 2019–2020 Australian megafires, we estimated population losses and recovery in fire‐affected fauna, to inform conservation status assessments and management. Location Temperate and subtropical Australia. Time period 2019–2030 and beyond. Major taxa Australian terrestrial a...

Insects are capable of extraordinary feats of long‐distance movement that have profound impacts on the function of terrestrial ecosystems. The ability to undertake these movements arose multiple times through the evolution of a suite of traits that make up the migratory syndrome, however the underlying genetic pathways involved remain poorly understood. Migratory hoverflies (Diptera: Syrphidae) are an emerging model group for...

Terrestrial runoff can negatively impact marine ecosystems through stressors including excess nutrients, freshwater, sediments, and contaminants. Severe storms, which are increasing with global climate change, generate massive inputs of runoff over short timescales (hours to days); such runoff impacted offshore reefs in the northwest Gulf of Mexico (NW GoM) following severe storms in 2016 and 2017. Several weeks after coastal...

Outbreaks of crown-of-thorns seastars (CoTS; Acanthaster spp.) are a major contributor to degradation of Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Understanding the dispersal and fate of planktonic life stages is crucial to understand and manage outbreaks, but visual detection of CoTS larvae is challenging. We apply a quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay to enumerate CoTS larvae in a 3-year time series of plankton samples from two reefs (Agincourt a...

Coral loss through consumption by corallivorous crown-of-thorns seastars (CoTS, Acanthaster spp. ) is a major contributor to the coral reef crisis in the Indo-Pacific region. The fourth wave of Acanthaster cf. solaris outbreaks since the 1960s started around 2010 on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Ecological monitoring failed to detect early outbreak stages, thus preventing timely intervention. Here, we develop a digital dropl...

Exposing the coral Stylophora pistillata to seawater depleted in available iron by complexation with the strong chelator desferrioxamine B reduces the photosynthetic efficiency and alters the pigment composition in its symbiotic algae at high temperatures. Similar effects of iron limitation are known for free‐living algae, but this is the first demonstration of low‐iron stress in a dinoflagellate living endosymbiotically. Main...

Polyploid and diploid hybridization is a ubiquitous and evolutionarily important phenomenon in the plant world. Determining the parental species of a hybrid, however, is difficult. Molecular markers such as the nuclear ribosomal DNA gene complex, particularly its internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, have proved powerful in determining hybrid parentage. In some cases, population and genomic phenomena, such as genetic drift...