2012 Essays

A shark from the past

Drew, Joshua Adam

One of the topics I find incredibly exciting is the idea of historical ecology. Briefly, historical ecology is essentially the study of what ecosystems looked like and how they functioned at any time in the past. This can take place at any temporal scale, from paleoecology to (in theory) last week. However the area that I look at is the time prior to full-scale commercial exploitation of coral reefs. These data are hard to come by because in the Pacific exploitation often predated full-scale scientific exploration. This often means we have to be creative in how we generate inferences into past ecosystems. One of the sources of data that I love to use are museum collections, and I my colleagues and I have been using these collections to reconstruct apex predatory communities in the Gilbert Islands in the country of Kiribati.