Exploring methods and patterns of ecological networks.
Reef fish ecology and evolution at broad scales.
Linking biological levels of organisation through energetics.
Taxonomic nestedness, the degree to which the taxonomic composition of species-poor assemblages represents a subset of richer sites, commonly occurs in habitat fragments and islands differing in size and isolation from a source pool. However, species are not ecologically equivalent and the extent to which nestedness is observed in terms of functional trait composition of assemblages still remains poorly known...
Body size and temperature are fundamental drivers of ecological processes because they determine metabolic rates at the individual level. Whether these drivers act independently on individual-level metabolic rates remains uncertain. Most studies of intraspecific scaling of unitary organisms must rely on preexisting differences in size to examine its relationship with metabolic rate, thereby potentially confounding size-correlated traits (e.g., age, nutrition) with size, which can affect metabolic rate...
Population ecology has classically focused on pairwise species interactions, hindering the description of general patterns and processes of population abundance at large spatial scales. Here we use the metabolic theory of ecology as a framework to formulate and test a model that yields predictions linking population density to the physiological constraints of body size and temperature on individual metabolism, and the ecological constraints of trophic structure and species richness on energy partitioning among species...
The feeding behaviour and diet plasticity of a given species are usually shaped by the relationship between species physiology and the quality and availability of resources in the environment. As such, some species may achieve wide geographical distributions by utilizing multiple resources at different sites within their ranges. We studied the distribution and feeding of *Chaetodon striatus*...
This study investigates the reef fish community structure of the world's smallest remote tropical island, the St Peter and St Paul's Archipelago, in the equatorial Atlantic. The interplay between isolation, high endemism and low species richness makes the St Peter and St Paul's Archipelago ecologically simpler than larger and highly connected shelf reef systems, making it an important natural laboratory for ecology and biogeography, particularly with respect to the effects of abiotic and biotic factors, and the functional organisation of such a depauperate community...
Fishes contribute substantially to energy and nutrient fluxes in reef ecosystems, but quantifying these roles is challenging. Here, we do so by synthesising a large compilation of fish metabolic-rate data with a comprehensive database on reef-fish community abundance and biomass...
We present a list with 10 new records of reef fish on the coast of Santa Catarina State, the southernmost site of tropical reef fish occurrence on the Brazilian coast. We also comment on the distribution-range of the recently described *Halichoeres sazimai* (Labridae).