Off the coast of Seychelles, fish that feed the population are more nutritious now than before a disastrous coral reef bleaching event decades ago.
“The Seychelles is a great place to study how fish contribute to people’s health because loads of people eat fish,” says James Robinson, a coral reef ecologist at Lancaster University in the UK and lead author on the paper.
“We wanted to first understand how nutritious are reef fish, so we took all these values and compared them to other meats like chicken, pork, and beef,” Robinson says. “What we found is that reef fish are similar or more nutritious than those meats … that was super cool, uncovering the roles that reefs are playing in people’s health.”
What’s more, the fish on the seaweed-heavy reefs had more iron and zinc than the same species on recovering coral sites. The significant change in the food web, moving toward nutrient-heavy macroalgae, “propagated up” the food chain to everything that eats the seaweed, Robinson says.