Why do reef fishes need to swim so fast?
Since the first discovery in the early 1990s that tropical coral reef fish larvae are impressive swimmers, capable of swimming between 20-50 cm/s (some even achieving 100 cm/s), there has been much fascination with why they need to swim so fast. Adult reef fishes are generally site-attached to a patch of reef, so it is their larvae that connects reefs together, and require high swimming speeds to swim against ocean and reef currents to seek out a suitable reef home. From a phylogenetic perspective, reef-associated species -tropical and temperate- are generally better swimmers than fishes that remain in the open ocean or find a random benthic patch to settle on (e.g., flatfishes). We found that high performance by both tropical and temperate reef fishes may be driven by body size and robust morphologies. Overall, the urgency to have to find a patchily-distributed coastal reef home may influence the need for these tiny animals to grow larger and swim faster.
Skillset:
-Phylogenetic comparative analysis
-data synthesis and meta-analysis skills in R
Notable papers:
Larval fish swimming review:
Phylogenetic larval swimming:
Current Collaborators:
Dr. Adam T. Downie, PhD 