Dr. John Bythell
Principal Investigator
Department of Marine Sciences & Coastal Management
Newcastle University, UK

John carried out his PhD research at the West Indies Laboratory on St. Croix from 1985-87 working on a nitrogen and carbon budget for the Elkhorn coral Acropora palmata. He returned there to take up a lectureship in 1988 and stayed on St. Croix up to 1991 when the lab was closed down following damage from Hurricane Hugo in 1989 (an interesting experience!). He returns to St Croix periodically to assist with the long-term coral reef monitoring project at Buck Island Reef National Monument run by the National Park Service, which he helped to establish in 1988. Unlike many Caribbean reefs this protected area has survived very well in the face of Hugo and a spate of other hurricanes since then.

Since 1991 John has been at Newcastle University in the UK, which houses a center for tropical research and teaching. He got a permanent lectureship in 1996 and recently took over as director of the Master's degree programme in Tropical Coastal Management, which has been running since 1987 and has some 150 graduates working in coastal management worldwide. His research spans community-level dynamics to cellular and molecular stress responses in corals and related organisms and he has worked in cold-water environments in the UK and the Mediterranean as well many tropical countries, focussing mainly on the Caribbean. On the current mission he will be working mainly on video camera set up for analysing coral feeding events, but will also be taking samples for stable isotope and carbon and nitrogen analysis to establish the energetic and nutritional value of coral prey.