USR 3278 CNRS, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Centre de Biologie et d’Ecologie Tropicale et Méditerranéenne (CRIOBE) - Serge Planes (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )
Total Foundation, France (http://foundation.total.com) – Overall funding 150.000 € (ECOMERS 100.000 €)
The Total Corporate Foundation was created in 1992 following the Rio Earth Summit. Originally focused on the environment and marine biodiversity, the Total Foundation is now active in four fields : marine biodiversity, culture/heritage, healthcare and community support. The Total Foundation's goal, which was reaffirmed in 2012, is to support the development of public interest actions that go beyond the industrial responsibility of its founder, TOTAL SA, by promoting the interconnection between expertise and innovation.
September 1st 2014 – August 30th 2016
- Marine caves usually host well diversified, unique and sensitive biological communities (mostly represented by sessile and vagile organisms, including fishes). However, they remain mostly unexplored and some aspects of their ecology unknown (e.g. spatial connectivity), which makes it difficult to adopt appropriate conservation/management measures.
- This project aims at investigating (1) the patterns of fish assemblage distribution in a number of representative marine caves, (2) the potential of the most common fish species, the cardinal fish Apogon imberbis, as a vector of trophic resources from outside into the caves, and (3) population connectivity of two fish species (A. imberbis and the leopard-spotted goby Thorogobius ephippiatus) among caves throughout the French Mediterranean.
- This study will help improve the available knowledge on marine caves in the Mediterranean, in the perspective of refining conservation/management schemes.