Research updates

April 2024

Two new honours students, Jenna Beyer and Josh Hamilton, have joined us this year as part of the Living Seawalls project. Jenna is interested in finding ways to reduce human impacts on our local ecosystems, particularly through habitat restoration and eco-engineering as tools to combat biodiversity loss. They will be evaluating the impact of the new Living Pilings installed at Sawmillers Reserve to see how seaweed, invertebrates and fish communities can be enhanced by providing habitat structures to smooth wharf pilings. Josh's research interests are investigating fish feeding behaviour around different artificial structures and how habitat providing modules such as Living Seawalls can benefit fish communities in the long term. His Honours research will center on investigating biodiversity survey of seaweed, invertebrates and fish communities inhabiting in the first Living Seawall, 5 years after its installation.

Habitat modules from Reef Design Lab have been deployed for trials in Chowder Bay by PhD student Lena Holtmanns, which will be used to test the interactive effects of light pollution and habitat complexity on fouling and fish species assemblages. We also have a new paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences on the effects of artificial light at night and warming on a sea urchin, Centrostephanus rodgersii. You can read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2024.0415