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Some of the mysteries of the deep blue sea will soon be revealed thanks to an intensive research program that has recently started in Western Australia.The multi-disciplinary team led by Dr Tony Koslow from CSIRO includes Dr Lynnath Beckley from Murdoch’s School of Environmental Science, and they will spend the next few years discovering how the ocean’s physical environment influences the distribution, abundance and lifecycles of many marine creatures. “We want to get a good handle on what is happening in the waters off Western Australia,” said Dr Beckley. “We already know quite a bit about the physical environment from satellite imagery studies but the ecology of the marine plankton off Western Australia is still relatively unknown.” The team, which includes Murdoch PhD students Jonathan Werry and Sorcha Gillen and Honours student Julia Marshall, will regularly sample waters along a 50 nautical mile transect extending from Two Rocks out across the continental shelf and beyond to 1000 metres depth. “We are recording information about the marine environment such as salinity, temperature, nutrients and chlorophyll levels as well as the diversity of species living there,” said Dr Beckley. “We are expecting to find very different species in the coastal waters compared to the deep waters off the continental shelf. “The deep waters will probably contain a mix of oceanic and tropical reef fish larvae as a result of the southward flowing Leeuwin current.” After building a picture of the biophysical environment of WA waters it is envisaged that the ichthyoplankton component of the program will focus on spawning and recruitment processes of selected fish species important to the commercial and recreational fisheries in south-western Australia. This research is funded by the $20 million Strategic Research Fund for the Marine Environment (SRFME), which aims to provide information to support ecologically sustainable development and conservation in the marine environment of Western Australia. |
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Editor: Pepi Smyth
Produced by the ">Office
of Community Relations, Murdoch
University |
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