Scientists find out what fear looks like from space
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Heron Island lagoon. Image downloaded from Google Earth 13 Oct. 2010. Image date 2 Aug. 2006. Credit: 2011 DigitalGlobe
(PhysOrg.com) — While most of us could find no better use for Google Earth than checking out a holiday destination, scientists in Sydney have shown it can reveal a lot about the behaviour of marine life on the Great Barrier Reef.
In what is believed to be the first research of its kind, University of Technology, Sydney marine biologist Dr Elizabeth Madin and colleagues – including Dr. Joshua Madin of Macquarie University and Professor David Booth from UTS – have usedGoogle Earth satellite images to observe the indirect effects of behavioural interactions between predators and prey in the lagoon habitat at Heron Island.
The results, published in the paper “Landscape of fear visible from space” in the first issue of the journal Nature Scientific Reports, have revealed distinct patterns of grazing halos – rings of bare sand devoid of seaweed – within the algal beds surrounding isolated groups of coral.
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