Baby Fish "Smell Their Way Home"

Remarkable in itself, the discovery by a team including Professor Mike Kingsford of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University and colleagues from Woods Hole, USA, also shines a new light on how the breathtaking diversity of fish on coral reefs has arisen. This has major implications for how reefs are managed.

(PressZoom) - Marine scientists working on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have uncovered evidence that baby fish, only millimetres long, manage to find their way to their home coral reef across miles of open sea by using their sense of smell.

Remarkable in itself, the discovery by a team including Professor Mike Kingsford of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University and colleagues from Woods Hole, USA, also shines a new light on how the breathtaking diversity of fish on coral reefs has arisen. This has major implications for how reefs are managed.

“The babies of many coral fish species are swept off their home reef by ocean currents within days of hatching. Ordinarily you’d expect them to be thoroughly mixed up and this would mean the population of one reef would be pretty much the same, genetically, as another,” he says.more on this story