Brazil is widely known as one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet, but despite having a marine territory of 3.6 million km², much of the focus is on terrestrial ecosystems. Focusing on connectivity, the project involves creating two products: (i) a report on the threats to marine biodiversity in Brazil today, and (ii) a scientific, data-driven illustration narrating the journey of a PET bottle cap thrown into a river in the Northeast interior to the sea, showing the impacts along the way and at the final destination, where the cumulative effect of human actions results in multiple threats.

The illustration will be presented in an interactive report to be published by Ambiental Media.

In the vast immensity of the sea, finding a space to live can be highly competitive for animals that live fixed to the bottom. The ability to grow and live on living substrates, known as epibiosis, is a direct consequence of this competition for space, and can offer different advantages and disadvantages to associated organisms. Hydroids are colonial cnidarians attached to various living substrates such as algae, sponges, corals and crustaceans. In this project, we ask whether the great diversity of forms, habits and life histories observed among hydroids can be explained by their interactions with different living substrates. Thus, we seek to understand the role of epibiosis in the diversity patterns of marine hydroids and the ecological and/or evolutionary factors that can explain these interactions.