Research Interests

My research interests are centered on the ecology of aquatic (primarily marine) communities. I am interested in interspecific relationships, in describing how communities are structured, and in understanding the basis of that structure. Much of my work involves investigating trophic relationships at all levels, from the individual species to complex community food webs. Approaches include individual predation studies, comparative studies of larger systems, experimental manipulation of natural communities, and theoretical models. Field studies of pristine communities as well as communities under various degrees of human stress have been helpful. My interests are primarily in tropical, marine, inshore systems, and I have done field work in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Although the community as a whole is the level of primary interest, my main expertise is with fishes, and my research normally involves major fish groups and various portions of the interacting community, depending on local constraints on the study. I also supervise studies in a variety of areas of fishery biology and fish ecology. My students often work on life history, species biology, and population ecology or resource management studies of species of fish or aquatic invertebrates. As the Leader of the Hawaii Cooperative Fishery Research Unit and a research scientist of the U.S. Geological Survey, I can often involve students effectively with activities of the Survey or the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and resources that those agencies study or manage.