I’ve been working in Hong Kong for 30 years and have spent most of this time trying to place tropical, monsoonal shores within the context of generally accepted patterns in intertidal ecology. Coming originally from a temperate background, my perceptions were changed arriving to the hot and barren shores that we find in Hong Kong during the hot season which contrast strongly with the vibrant life that we find in the cool winter season. The speed at which assemblages change, the high summer mortalities and then rapid winter recovery makes an incredibly dynamic system where species adopt a ‘live fast die young strategy’.

 

Trying to piece all these things together has proved challenging. Unlike in many temperate areas, the taxonomy of species in this region is poorly understood and even less is known of their ecologies. To try and document these patterns our group has spent a lot of time detailing the basic ecology of species in the region; much in collaboration with a great set of colleagues in Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, China and Malaysia. This information is so important when we try and interpret community patterns and yet seems to be out of fashion these days! From these studies we have focused on a few aspects, mostly around species behaviour and physiology, related to surviving in the extremes of a tropical intertidal zone. Inevitably, this work has mostly concentrated on rocky shore limpets and snails; but we have branched out to sandy shore crabs; mangrove snails and even vertebrates in the form of mudskippers at times……

Recently, studies have widened to consider how changing environmental conditions are affecting species responses over geographic ranges (working from Singapore to northern China) and currently to the survival strategies of high shore species, which are living in extreme harsh environments on tropical shores. As ever, these studies are revealing exciting findings and always challenging paradigms associated with temperate regions. Hopefully the insights we gain, as the world becomes a warmer place, will play an important role in how we can perhaps anticipate and manage future changes to species distributions, especially in understudied tropical areas.