Meyer, D.L

Colorful feather stars (comatulid crinoids, Phylum Echinodermata) were plentiful on the reefs of Curaçao and Bonaire in the late 1960s when David Meyer was seeking accessible localities for the study of their ecology and distribution. From 2000 to 2010, and with the help of several students, David Meyer resurveyed sites on the leeward reefs of both islands where previous quantitative surveys had been conducted. Results confirmed that populations of crinoids were decreasing, 

This news article was published in BioNews 22

BioNews is produced by the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance and funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

The status of coral reefs around the world is almost exclusively gauged by data on reef-building corals (live coverage, diversity, prevalence of diseases or bleaching), macroalgae (coverage, diversity), and fish (diversity, abundance). Long-term monitoring data on the myriad of other reef biota are quite scarce. Exceptions are population density of the echinoderms Diadema antillarum or Acanthaster planci, or the Queen Conch, Lobatus gigas. In most cases, as we are well aware, long-term trends in population density are declining. Gradual long-term or drastic increases are well known for macroalgae, lionfish or A. planci. Here I am calling attention to changes in population density of reef- dwelling comatulid crinoids (“feather stars”, Echinodermata) on some western Atlantic reefs in Jamaica and the Netherlands Antilles, that are paradoxical as they are counter to long-term trends in the better-known indicators of coral coverage and fish abundance.