Today, our new paper on Drought, Mutualism Breakdown, and landscape-scale degradation of seagrass beds is published online in Current Biology!
In this paper, we show that drought, due to climate extremes can trigger landscape-scale seagrass degradation and consequent failure of the facultative feedback between seagrasses and lucinid clams can exacerbate collapse. The study was conducted in the vast intertidal seagrass beds of Banc d’Arguin, Mauritania (West-Africa).
This is the first study that shows how external disturbances may cause sudden breakdown of a facultative marine mutualism.
Read the paper here and on ScienceNews
Laura Govers 