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1 Rich Aronson (right) and Bill Precht grew up not far from each other in Queens, New York. Blissfully unaware of each other's existence, they both visited the Discovery Bay Marine Laboratory in Jamaica as undergraduates in 1978. There they came to love coral reefs just before disaster struck throughout the region. Rich and Bill met at Discovery Bay in 1987, when the reef was already in a sorry state, and they have been working together ever since. Rich is now a Senior Marine Scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, a consortium of colleges and universities in Alabama dedicated to education and research in the marine sciences. Bill is the Ecological Sciences Program Manager for the international consulting firm PBS&J in Miami. -- Rich was trained as a benthic ecologist at Harvard University but went over to the dark side of paleontology when he saw how powerful geological approaches could be in answering ecological questions. Bill was trained as a carbonate sedimentologist at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, but he deeply appreciates the value of understanding short-term ecological fluctuations. Their coring work in Belize was instigated by Jeremy Jackson, the most persuasive advocate of the position that Caribbean reefs have been fundamentally altered in recent times. Bill and Rich, being a couple of smart-asses from Queens, didn't believe it and had to find out for themselves. -- This work has been supported on a continuing basis by the Smithsonian Institution's Caribbean Coral Reef Ecosystems Program and the National Geographic Society, and more recently by grants from the National Science Foundation (OCE-9901969 and EAR-9902192).
| The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In a book review published in 1982, the late Peter Williamson characterized paleoecology as "a poor-man's applied ecology performed on inadequate data." Whether or not this incendiary remark was justified at the time, there is no disputing that in the years since 1982 paleoecology has provided much insight into the nature of biotic interactions and community structure. As a recent and obvious example, the debate over coordinated stasis has forced us to consider macroecological dynamics at spatial and temporal scales greater than those of the community. Disagreement over these ideas has led to research on how and why fossil assemblages change through time. Paleoecology is clearly thriving as an intellectual pursuit.
The first part of Williamson's remark is the least controversial. Most of us will indeed remain poor in terms of funding for basic research in paleoecology. If taken seriously, however, those stinging words pose an unintentional and ironic challenge: to use paleoecology to solve practical problems. Paleoecologists must direct their efforts to the pressing ecological challenges before humanity, and they must practice applied paleoecology with adequate—that is to say, statistically robust—data. One problem that is clearly important from a practical standpoint is the radically altered composition of reef communities in the Caribbean over the past 25 years.
The regional-scale transition of Caribbean reef communities since the late 1970s from dominance by scleractinian corals to dominance by noncoralline (fleshy and filamentous) macroalgae has provoked strenuous debate about its underlying ecological processes. Is the current situation natural or the product of anthropogenic stresses and disturbances? Knowing whether similar changes occurred in the past is crucial to addressing this question.
By now the wretched state of Caribbean coral reefs should be depressingly familiar. Reef habitats that once supported spectacular coral growth are now covered with brown algae. On the fore reef off
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