Page posted Mar 16, 2024
Edited version of PDF (Patriquin14Mar2024CORALLagm.pdf) uploaded Mar. 18, 2024
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I was invited to give a presentation about Vauxhall Reef to CORALL at its 2024 AGM held on March 14, 2024. It is available here as an Annotated PDF, i.e. the original slides as presented, with some comments added to provide the context of the slides as given at the AGM.
Download or view PDF in a Browser (4.7 MB)
From the Comments
Comment:
I was introduced to Barbados and tropical marine biology when, as a McGill student, Prof Mel Goldstein of McGill invited me to assist him and Prof William Randolph Taylor of the University of Michigan with collecting seaweed specimens from Barbados in February of 1966. In turn, in the summer of 1966 I attended a field course on Tropical Marine Biology at the Bellairs Research Institute of McGill University in Holetown. It was given by Dr. John Lewis, the Bellairs founder and first Director and several other McGill profs. Lewis’s specialty was coral reefs; he wrote some of the now classical papers on Barbados reefs*.
We spent most of our field time on a very healthy fringing reef on our doorstep, the “Bellairs Reef”. When Profs. Lewis and Goldstein asked me if I would be interested in studying seagrass beds for my PhD, I had no hesitation replying. I spent the years from mid-1967 to early 1970 doing just that accompanied by my spouse, Nina; my field sites were in Barbados (mainly at Bath on the east coast) and around the island of Carriacou, Grenada.
We returned to Barbados intermittently over the years and always I poked around the fringing reefs on the west coast just for the enjoyment but enough to notice sharp declines in reef quality over the years.
*Particularly pertinent to fringing reefs:
– Lewis, John B. “The coral reefs and coral communities of Barbados, WI.” Canadian Journal of Zoology 38.6 (1960): 1133-1145.
– Lewis, John B. “The Acropora inheritance: a reinterpretation of the development of fringing reefs in Barbados, West Indies.” Coral Reefs 3 (1984): 117-122.
– Lewis, John B. “Biology and ecology of the hydrocoral Millepora on coral reefs.” Advances in marine biology 50 (2006): 1-55.