Caroline Rogers, Ph.D. (Former Employee)

Coral reefs are the jewels of the tropical oceans. They boast the highest diversity of all marine ecosystems, aid in the development and protection of other important, productive coastal marine communities, and have provided millions of people with food, building materials, protection from storms, recreation and social stability over thousands of years, and more recently, income, active

Coral diseases have caused significant losses on Caribbean reefs and are becoming a greater concern in the Pacific. Progress in coral disease research requires collaboration and communication among experts from many different disciplines. The lack of consistency in the use of terms and names in the recent scientific literature reflects the absence of an authority for naming coral...

The Sargassum Frogfish (Histrio histrio), the only pelagic member of the frogfish family Antennariidae, is considered an obligate associate of floating mats of the brown algae Sargassum natans and S. fluitans (Adams 1960; Dooley 1972; Pietsch and Grobecker 1987). Between February and April 2010, 20 of these fish were observed in three mangrove-fringed bays in Virgin Islands Coral Reef...

A narrow zone of red mangroves fringes the shorelines of four small bays in Hurricane Hole, within Virgin Islands Coral Reef National Monument (VICRNM) on St. John. In two of these bays, Otter Creek and Water Creek, a particularly high abundance and diversity of corals are growing directly on or near the prop roots (Fig. 1a,b,c). To date, 28 coral species have been found: Stephanocoenia...

In the summer/fall of 2005, extensive coral bleaching on reefs in the US Virgin Islands (USVI) was associated with sea water temperatures exceeding 30°C. Almost all coral species bleached, including Acropora palmata, which bleached for the first time on record in the USVI. As water temperatures cooled, corals began to regain their normal coloration. However, a severe disease outbreak...

In the northeast Caribbean, doldrum-like conditions combined with elevated water temperatures in the summer/fall 2005 created the most severe coral bleaching event ever documented within this region. Video monitoring of 100 randomly chosen, permanent transects at five study sites in the US Virgin Islands revealed over 90% of the scleractinian coral cover showed signs of thermal stress by...