<p>Some tropical reefs are transitioning from coral to novel seaweed communities in response to human alterations of critical environmental drivers, highlighting the need to deepen our understanding of the functional ecology of seaweed. Trait-based ecology shows early promise for this purpose, motivating exploration of traits that reveal ecological strategies of seaweed on tropical reefs. We measured nine traits of 36 seaweed species from Mo’orea, French Polynesia that balance the need to acquire resources, resist herbivores, and resist physical disturbance. We selected a subset of four traits to evaluate whether this reduced set of traits revealed the same ecological strategies. For both the full and reduced set of traits, we used PCA to visualize multivariate trait data, quantified the contribution of traits to the first two PCs with loading plots, and explored bivariate trade-offs with correlation analysis. We identified one ecological strategy that trades off maximizing resource acquisition with resistance to disturbance and/or herbivory, and another that traded off between two resistance traits. We found some ecological strategies varied across environmental contexts as novel tradeoffs and orthogonal relationships emerged for our tropical algae compared to temperate findings, though species or trait selection may also play a role. Overall, four traits captured ecological strategies important to seaweeds subject to human impacts altering resources, herbivory, and disturbance. We hope this method of trait selection expedites exploration of ecological strategies and rapidly advances our understanding of the functional ecology of tropical seaweed.</p>