A new paper – led by Northeastern MS student Harriet Booth and in collaboration with David Kimbro (Northeastern), Chris Stallings (USF), and Tim Pusack (Williams/Mystic) – uses a combination of field observations and field experiments to show that a recent increase in the abundance of an oyster predator (crown conch) has unexpectedly not led to the collapse of oyster populations in a Florida estuary, evidently because predation rates decrease at high predator densities.

Booth HS, Pusack TJ, White JW, Stallings CD, Kimbro DL. 2018. Intraspecific predator inhibition, not a prey size refuge, enables oyster population persistence during predator outbreaks. Marine Ecology Progress Series 602: 155-167