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Project properties |
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| Title | Using trophic relations to explore a coral reef food web in the Dutch Caribbean |
| Group | Marine Animal Ecology |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 12 |
| Supervisor(s) | Carmen-Lucia David
Alwin Hylkema |
| Examiner(s) | Tinka Murk, Reindert Nijland, Ronald Osinga, Rosa van der Ven, Diede Maas |
| Contact info | carmen-lucia.david@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2024/09/01 |
| End date | 2025/09/01 |
| Description | Food webs represent a structured way of looking at marine life functioning, by illustrating an entire community assemblage through one graphical representation. Food webs describe which species are present in an environment, how they interact, and what kind of trophic interactions exist between species, such as who eats whom.
In this project, the student will familiarize her/himself with the marine biodiversity associated with coral reefs on St. Eustatius, in the Dutch Caribbean, and use literature and online databases, such as WORMS and GBIF, to identify trophic relations among the species living on coral reefs. Trophic data originates mainly from stomach analysis and from stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, which can tell us the trophic level of a species in the food web. The species list for this project was collected at multiple reef locations around St. Eustatius and includes a large variety of fish, invertebrates, corals and algae (https://repository.naturalis.nl/pub/616970). With the list of species and their trophic relations extracted from online databases, the student will learn how to build a food web and to describe the characteristics of such trophic network. |
| Used skills | |
| Requirements | Knowledge of marine biology and ecology; basic skills in R or python, and data analysis; interest in coral reefs biodiversity |