This September marks the one year anniversary of the arrival of the current Lionfish Research and Education Program (LREP) manager, Dr. Jocelyn Curtis-Quick. Jocelyn is a marine ecologist with over ten years of tropical marine field experience from all over the world. She has a Master’s degree from Plymouth University and PhD. from the University of Essex, both of which primarily focused on reef resilience and how fish respond to habitat degradation. Many reef fish play important ecosystem functional roles and their demise can have significant implications for the reef system. The Indo-Pacific, where Jocelyn conducted her studies, has especially high diversity and functional redundancy, which means that reefs in this area are more capable to resist and recover from disturbance. Jocelyn’s PhD. increased our understanding of niche partitioning and resource utilization by key fish taxa and importantly identified the plasticity of fish to adapt their feeding strategy in response to changing habitat quality.To read the rest of this article, please check out the summer edition of CEI’s eNews, which can be found here:
http://www.ceibahamas.org/ENews/CEI/2013_Fall/2013_FALL_CEI.html