Renato Morais

Alumni

31 May

Post Doc

A quick glance at Renato's "pre-settlement" life in inland Brazil would not suggest any particular involvement with the ocean. Yet, he tortuously traced his path to coastal southern Brazil, where he undertook his Bachelor in Biological Sciences and Masters in Ecology at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. He studied the patterns and drivers of reef fish biomass along Brazilian reefs, supervised by Profs. Sergio Floeter and Carlos Ferreira. In June 2016 he joined Prof. Bellwood's lab to start his PhD focusing on the productivity of coral reef fishes.

During his PhD, he developed a framework to improve and popularise estimates of fish biomass production in high-diversity ecosystems via the R package rfishprod (Morais and Bellwood 2020 Coral Reefs). This framework allowed interesting insights on the energetics of coral reefs (e.g. Morais et al. 2020 Functional Ecology), which opened the door for topics Renato will be pursuing during his post-doc at the Reef Function Hub. These topics include the role of spatial subsidies in the production of fish biomass on coral reefs (follow up from Morais and Bellwood 2019 Current Biology), and whether or not buffering productivity (i.e. the resistance of production facing overexploitation; follow up from Morais, Connolly and Bellwood 2020 Global Change Biology) is a process likely to sustain reef fisheries yields.