Fish Ecology Lab

03/07/2025

Congratulations to Kirsty Richards who got her second chapter of her PhD published today. This research documents how fish assemblages change across an inverse salinity gradient across the Eastern Gulf of Shark Bay and up into Hamelin Pool.

You can read the paper at https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1lN1eW5UJVSPw

Abstract
Variation in environmental conditions drive changes within aquatic ecosystems and their associated inhabitants, with salinity and temperature influencing the spatial and temporal patterns of biological communities. An extreme salinity gradient exists within the Eastern Gulf of Shark Bay UNESCO World Heritage Area, Western Australia, reaching

10/03/2025

🌊 New research alert! Angola’s fisheries are poorly documented, but this study offers key insights into decommissioning options like jacket removal or reefing and their impact on important fish species. Using high-definition ROV video, researchers analysed fish assemblages, confirming these structures support key fisheries while highlighting the need to consider fish assemblage dynamics and local stakeholder values and needs.

👏 Congrats to all the the authors: Karl Schramm, Euan Harvey, Brooke Marshall, Ben Saunders, Peter Oliver, Travis Elsdon, Michael Marnane and Anthony Rouphael.

🔗 Read more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141113625000686?via%3Dihub

06/11/2023

Dr Etienne Rastoin has just published his paper ‘Fluctuations of Galapagos mid-water and benthic reef fish populations during the 2015–16 ENSO’ in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science. The publication of this research is very timely, as we enter another El-Nino event.
Etienne conducted this research as a PhD student in the Fish Ecology Lab, and in collaboration with the Charles Darwin Foundation. Congratulations Etienne! Thanks to all collaborators and co-authors Etienne Rastoin-Laplane, Pelayo Salinas-de-León, Jordan Goetze, Ben Saunders, Simon McKinley, Courtney Norris, Corinna Gosby, Andrea Mattingly, Rodrigo Garcia, and Euan Harvey.
The paper is open access and can be found here:

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have impacted the marine environment of the Galapagos, causing massive die-offs of corals and megafauna, an…

08/08/2023

Jason Alexander has just publshed the 3rd chapter from his thesis. This one uses environmental DNA to describe the boiological communiites assosicated with Oil and Gas Platfrms in Thailand. He discusses decommisioning options based on the patterns in the data. It is a great paper published in Science of the Total Environment. Many thanks to the coauthors Michael Marnane, Travis Elsdon, Mike Bunce, Paweena Sitaworawet, Se Songploy , Sarin Chaiyakul and Euan Harvey. Thanks to Chevron for funding the research.

A big congratulations to Jason as he has been approved to graduate from his PhD. He got glowing reviews and a commendation form the Chancellor of Curtin University.

ScienceDirect is the world's leading source for scientific, technical, and medical research. Explore journals, books and articles.

22/06/2023

Dion Boddington has published the second chapter in his masters, this one on the life-history characteristics and mortality of the frostback rockcod. You can access the paper at

The frostback rockcod, Epinephelus bilobatus, is a small epinephelid (

27/04/2023

Tina Berry has just had her paper ‘A 3-year plankton DNA metabarcoding survey reveals marine biodiversity patterns in Australian coastal waters’ published in Diversity and Distributions. Congratulations Tina! Tina’s research used bulk eDNA samples to detect seasonal patterns in zooplankton diversity across 3 years from sites around Australia, and linked these patterns with concurrent abiotic data collected as part of Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) programme. The research was conducted through the TrEnD lab at Curtin University.
Thank you to all of the collaborators involved, including co-authors Megan Coghlan, Ben Saunders, Anthony Richardson, Matthew Power, Euan Harvey, Simon Jarman, Oliver Berry, Claire Davies, and Michael Bunce.

Aim To use a long-term collection of bulk plankton samples to test the capacity of DNA metabarcoding to characterize the spatial and seasonal patterns found within a range of zooplankton communities...

27/04/2023

Congratulations to Simon McKinley who has just published the second paper from his master's thesis.
The research explores the functional diversity of reef fish assemblages in the Galapagos archipelago using stereo-BRUVs. It finds that the reef ecosystems of Galapagos are vulnerable to reduced fish functional diversity if fish species are lost. Environmental variation and habitat complexity were important predictors of functional diversity across the Galapagos.
Thanks to Ben Saunders, Etienne Rastoin-Laplane, Pelayo Salinas-de-Leon and Euan Harvey for collaboration on the project.

The Galapagos archipelago's unique reef biodiversity and fish distribution patterns are well documented. However, reef ecosystem vulnerability to losi…

06/04/2023

We have just had a paper published with Johanna Zimmerhackel, Julian Clifton, Fran Ackermann, Michael Burton, Carmen Elrick-Barr, Georgie Hill describing a framework for assessing the the social and economic value of man-made marine structures.
The paper is in Marine Policy. The research is an outcome of an Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC-2018-53) grant run awarded to Euan Harvey through Curtin University industry funding from Chevron. Thanks to Luke Twomey at the Western Australian Marine Science Institution for cheering our steering committee, and to the Western Australian Fishing Industry Council and Recfishwest for their support.
the paper is available at

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25/03/2023

We have had a new paper published today with Alethea Inglis from University of Aberdeen as the lead author. The research compares the functional diversity of fish assemblages in the vicinity of oil and gas pipelines at Thevenard Island, North Western Australia to nearby natural reef and soft sediment habitats.

Thanks to Travis Elsdon and Michael Marnane from Chevron and Karl Schramm and Euan Harvey from Curtin University for coauthoring the paper.
You can read the research at the link below.

06/03/2023

Broad scale monitoring of marine diversity is challenging, with many techniques limited to sampling only a small portion of the actual diversity prese…

06/03/2023

Congratulations to Jason Alexander who just had the second paper of his PhD accepted on environmental DNA . His research showed you really need to target your method of colletion to the types of organisms you want to sample. On subsea pylons to target epibenthic organisms you needed a sampling strategy and tool that came into contact with the structure. Water and plankton tows collected adjacent to the pylons sampled a different assemblage in comparison to Swabs and scrapes.
Thanks to Chevron for funding this research and CSIRO for supporting Jason's scholarship. Thanks to Michael Marnane, Justin McDonald, Sherralee Lukehurst, Travis Elsdon, Tiffany Simpson, Shawn Hinz, Mike Bunce and Euan Harvey for collaborating.
We acknowledge Kevin Holden of DeepVision for assistance with the ROV sampling.

Broad scale monitoring of marine diversity is challenging, with many techniques limited to sampling only a small portion of the actual diversity prese…