Simon J. Brandl

The sheer number of ecologists who had their LOI rejected this week is comical. I'm honored to be part of the club 😂

Meme with top photo of Grogu (baby Yoda) and text: Professor on website Bottom photo of Yoda and text: professor in reality

No no, you should keep it forever, as is traditional!

Woody Guthrie's New Year's resolutions at 30 yrs old, 1943:

woodyguthrie.org/newyearsruli...

🚨 Research Highlight | New tools—Surprising findings: A new study shows human impacts cause relatively little changes in energy flow on coral reefs

📖 Read the research highlight ➡️ buff.ly/J52H2WN

📖 Read the full paper ➡️ buff.ly/W98t51d

who decided to call it Secret Santa when Nondisclosure Claus was right there

Community structure and microhabitat associations of cryptobenthic fishes in Veracruz, Mexico

First PhD-paper by @r-higueras.bsky.social, exploring the tiny fish communities on reefs off the coast of her hometown 🥹

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Did someone say resting fish face?

The #LonghornCowfish is easy to spot with its bright yellow color and the signature horns jutting from its head. But those horns aren’t just for style — scientists think they evolved to make this little cowfish a mouthful most predators can’t swallow.

A three panel comic. In panel 1, two people are facing each other. The first person asks "Hey, do you want to drive really far and spend hours staring at distant, rapidly moving gray-brown objects while trying to find subtle differences between them?" and the second says "No." In panel 2, the first person says "What if they're bird-shaped?" and the second person says "Then absolutely, yes." In panel 3, the two people are standing and looking through binoculars at distant shorebirds on a beach. The first person says "Yay shorebirds season!" and the second says "Woo!"

It's that time again :>

New study from @wcs.org and partners document 85% decline in abundance of Nassau grouper at their spawning site at Glover's Reef over 20 years, moving the population to local extirpation. Read more from Coral Reefs: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Photo (c) Connor Holland/Ocean Image Bank

Tiny blue-green crystals (there's a green coloured arrow stuck on the specimen to point these out) with some leaf-green illite and blue azurite on a matrix. From Bambollita Mine, Moctezuma, Sonora, Mexico. Specimen from the Natural History Museum, London's collections.

1 of #365Minerals 🧪⚒️

Quetzalcoatlite:
- Named after Quetzalcoatl, an Aztec and Toltec god of the sea, due to its sea-blue colour
- Forms in the oxidised zone of tellurium-bearing hydrothermal deposits #minerals
- This below is a co-type specimen (one of the specimens used to define the species)

New manta ray new manta ray NEW MANTA RAY!

Phenomenal first PhD paper by the marvelous @lljeannot.bsky.social – check it out folks, it has birds, coral reefs, and tiny fish!

🐠🦈 Just out: In this paper we ask "How has reef trophic structure changed since humans started removing predatory fishes from Caribbean coral reefs?".

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Illustrations @cookedillustrations.com

Idea of Coral Reefs as Oases in Marine Deserts May Be Mistaken New research from Simon Brandl at The University of Texas at Austin challenges a long-held belief about coral reefs.

New research challenges the long-held belief that coral reefs are “oases” in marine deserts. While among the world’s most productive ecosystems, their existence in nutrient-deprived oceans is the exception rather than the rule. @gobyone.bsky.social @utmsi.bsky.social
cns.utexas.edu/news/researc...

Yes, @joey-squishfish.bsky.social – this is fossilized marine lint! 😁

Our new paper on the historical and scientific basis of Darwin’s ‘coral reef paradox’ is out @currentbiology.bsky.social! Summary below by @gobyone.bsky.social.

Also with @paulinenarvaez.bsky.social
@oclaripv.bsky.social
and Vale Parravicini!

Free-access link:
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lDFm3QW8S...

Cool description of seven miniature fish species from the Triassic that may be similar to modern day cryptobenthics. Apparently they were all over the Tethys Sea 240 million years ago, measuring in at a whopping 4cm adult body size 🥹 Scale bar in 📷 is 5mm!

linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii...

a cartoon of alice from alice in wonderland says why thank you ! ALT: a cartoon of alice from alice in wonderland says why thank you !

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Global Patterns and Drivers of Freshwater Fish Extinctions: Can We Learn From Our Losses?

🔗 buff.ly/1ljgy5X

New research challenges long-held belief of coral reefs as oases in marine deserts The popular notion that coral reefs are often surrounded by "deserts", devoid of nutrients and plankton, isn't true.

A detailed summary of our paper's results is provided below. This work was funded by a Branco Weiss Fellowship and the US National Science Foundation.

Photos by @jordancasey.bsky.social

www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

Scientific semantics aside, why does this matter? It matters because reefs clearly depend much more on their surrounding oceans than commonly assumed. As we alter not just reefs themselves, but also broader dynamics like nutrients, currents, and plankton blooms, reefs will have to cope with both.

Not really, because the oceans around reefs aren't deserts. Most reefs do not occur in conditions we would define as nutrient-poor. They thrive instead across a vast spectrum of oceanographic regimes, and 80% of reefs are surrounded by waters we would generally classify as meso- or eutrophic.

Does that mean it's all wrong? Not quite, because coral reefs are indeed ridiculously productive. We compared net primary production across Earth's ecosystems and found that reefs outpace almost all other systems in their ability to produce biomass. They're absolute powerhouses. Dare I say, oases?

First, Darwin never said nothing about reef productivity & nutrients. In fact, old Chucky D didn't have the basic oceanographic knowledge to arrive at the paradox conclusion. Instead, it arose after the first coral reef ecosystem metabolism studies in the 1950s and was misattributed in the 80s/90s

Rethinking Darwin’s coral reef paradox and the ubiquity of “marine oases” Morais et al. evaluate the history of Darwin’s paradox and the prevalence of oligotrophic conditions among coral reefs. They find no link between Darwin and the marine oasis concept. Most coral reefs ...

Our new paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social, led by @renatoamorais.bsky.social, examined the history and veracity of the alleged paradox and its patron Charles Darwin.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

@oclaripv.bsky.social
@paulinenarvaez.bsky.social
@utaustin.bsky.social
@psl-univ.bsky.social

Heard of "Darwin's paradox"? It refers to Charles Darwin's observation that coral reefs are wildly productive despite occurring in nutrient-poor tropical oceans. Reefs are, so the story goes, oases in marine deserts 🏝️...

Turns out that 2/3 of these assertions are very wrong...

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☀️🌏🇮🇹High pressure conditions have cleaned the sky almost everywhere over a wonderfully green #Italy and its islands, reaching 30°C in multiple regions for the first time in 2025. In the meanwhile a heavy saharahn dust event is about to touch the SW coast of Sardegna.⬇️View of Sentinel3 on May 2.

In good tradition, here are a few tiny fishes with bunny ears 🐰

I am pleased to announce The Macroevolution Lab at Ohio State opens this August! We will be housed in the Museum of Biological Diversity 🐟🐠🐡

When thinking of the 'model' planktivore on reefs, fusiliers come to mind - their fusiform bodies, forked caudal fins, and large eyes appear built for the job. But are these traits common among most plankton-feeding reef fishes? 🐟

🔗 The story is more nuanced than we thought: doi.org/10.1007/s111...