A new study by biologists at San Diego State University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography shows that inhabited coral islands that engage in commercial fishing
The study's lead author, Linda Wegley Kelly, is a postdoctoral
scholar in the lab of SDSU virologist Forest Rohwer. She's been involved in
some capacity with Rohwer's lab for the past 13 years, beginning as a lab
technician.
For the study, she looked at seawater samples collected from the
surfaces of reefs surrounding all 11 of the Line Islands, a chain of atolls in
the central Pacific Ocean. Over the past five years, Kelly and her colleagues
have made sporadic trips to the islands, collecting the samples with a
specially adapted bilge pump that sucks up approximately 100 liters of water in
a given area.