Rabbits to the rescue of the reef(and chomping away at more than ten times...)

The rabbit fish is not a fish you tend to take a lot of notice of, Prof. Bellwood explains. Like its terrestrial counterpart, it is brown, bland and easily overlooked but it could be very important when it comes to protecting the GBR. We hadnt seen it previously at this site despite conducting over 100 visual censuses. This made its appearance in numbers sufficient to check the weedy growth all the more remarkable.

However the team noticed the rabbit fish concentrated their weed-removal efforts on the crest of the reef and were less effective on the slopes and flats a feeding preference that is yet to be explained.

In a previous study, an overgrown reef had been cleaned up by another unexpected intruder, a striped batfish.

Ms. Fox explained that the recovery of damaged reefs may depend on several different guilds of fishes, with different feeding preferences, that will focus on particular parts of the reef and stages of the weed infestation.

For such an approach to work, however, all the various species have to be kept intact in the reef environment, ready to play their part in a salvage operation when it becomes necessary.

In Australia these herbivore fish populations are still in fairly good shape, but around the world as the big predators are fished out, local fishermen are targetting the herbivores. In Hawaii, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Micronesia and French Polynesia there are reports of serious declines in herbivore numbers of up to 90 per cent.

By killing them, we may be unwittingly eliminating the very thing which enables coral reefs to bounce back from the sort of shocks which human activity exposes them to.

Prof. Bellwood says that one of the lessons from the video study is that obscure fish species may play a critical role in the survival and maintenance of coral ecosystems, and should not be overlooked. They
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