New paper: Subconscious biases in coral reef fish studies

This paper by David Bellwood, Christopher Hemingson and Sterling Tebbett was just published in BioScience and is the first publication associated with the Reef Function Hub.

Dave, Chris and Sterling surveyed 37 years of reef fish publications and categorised them according to which fish were studied, where and how.

They found that of an estimated 6000-plus reef fish species, less than 7 per cent were selected for study, with just 0.1 per cent examined 10 per cent of the time. But how were they selected?

“Remarkably, most fish research focuses on a handful of butterflyfishes
and damselfishes, and of these, almost all have bright colours, especially yellow.
Drab, dark-coloured fishes appear to be largely ignored,”
- David Bellwood

To find out more about how subconscious biases of reef fish researchers may limit our ability to fully understand reef functions, find the full paper here.

“Brightly coloured fishes are interesting, but the future of coral reefs
may depend on their drab counterparts that do not make it into
advertisements but do keep coral reefs alive.”