Shino Ogawa
Department of Zoology,
University of Hawai`i
2538 McCarthy Mall,
Edmondson 152
Honolulu, HI 96822
shino@hawaii.edu

Research Interests:
Shino Ogawa was born and raised in Kanagawa, Japan and spent her high school years in Jakarta, Indonesia, where she learned how to speak English and Indonesian. And of course, beautiful marine life of Indonesia amazed her and she eventually aspired to become a marine biologist. She moved to Hawaii, studied zoology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and received a B.S. degree in Zoology in 2003. Now she is in UH Manoa again, pursuing graduate studies.

She is interested in interspecific competition, which is an important determinant of the species composition and biodiversity, in coral reef communities. She is currently working on competition between two scleractinian corals and another clonal cnidarian - zoanthids (Zoanthus sansibaricus), whose ecology is not yet well studied despite its high abundance on coral reefs. On the reefs of Kaneohe Bay, the two coral species, Porites compressa and Pocillopora damicornis, seem to be readily overgrown by Z. sansibaricus, but P. compressa seems to be more susceptible to overgrowth. Reefs covered with Z. sansibaricus also appear to be more physically fragmented than those that are free of Z. sansibaricus.

In this study, she is trying to investigate the competitive interaction between Zoanthus sansibaricus and these two coral species to determine how this interaction affects the process of bioerosion and stability of the reef framework. She is also testing the hypothesis that the spread of Z. sansibaricus alters the community composition of the reef by differentially eliminating coral species, hoping that the results of this study will contribute to a better understanding of the ecology of Z. sansibaricus and the community-level effects of interspecific competition in coral reefs, which may have implications for reef conservation.