Fish diversity divergence between tropical eastern pacific and tropical western Atlantic coral reefs
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Fish diversity divergence between tropical eastern pacific and tropical western Atlantic coral reefs Manuel Olán-González & Héctor Reyes-Bonilla & Lorenzo Álvarez-Filip & Horacio Pérez-España & Damien Olivier
Received: 18 May 2020 / Accepted: 6 September 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract A comparison of fish diversity was carried out among 45 sites within four localities in the Mexican Tropical Western Atlantic (TWA) and Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP) regions. Several taxonomical and functional diversity indices were considered, and their relationships with the coral cover were investigated in each locality. We found that despite a lower number of species, the localities within the Mexican TEP region had equal or even higher functional diversity than the localities in the Mexican TWA region where sites within the Caribbean Sea appeared particularly poorly diversified.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-020-01026-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Olán-González : H. Reyes-Bonilla : D. Olivier (*) Departamento Académico de Ciencias Marinas y Costeras, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, La Paz, B.C.S, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] L. Álvarez-Filip Biodiversity and Reef Conservation Laboratory, Unidad Académica de Sistemas Arrecifales, Instituto de Ciencias del Mar y Limnología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico H. Pérez-España Laboratorio de Ecosistemas de Arrecifes, Instituto de Ciencias Marinas y Pesquerías, Universidad Veracruzana, Boca del Río, Veracruz, Mexico D. Olivier Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Ciudad de México, Mexico
Divergent relationships between fish diversity and coral cover were observed between the two oceanic regions. On the one hand, it tended to be positive in the TWA, and on the other hand, it was negative in the two TEP localities. This contrast may be explained by the low coral species richness and the homogeneous habitat (low structural complexity) provided by a high cover of coral in the TEP. This study highlighted how the fish assemblages can be functionally diversified within the TEP, a region generally considered poorly diversified, and how the relationship between fish diversity and coral cover may vary between oceanic regions.
Keywords Coral reefs . Fish biodiversity . Biological trait analysis . Structural complexity
Introduction A consensus agrees that high cover and diversity of corals boosts fish assemblages in terms of species richness, density, and biomass (Risk 1972; Graham and Nash 2013; Coker et al. 2014). Besides, coral cover loss is generally followed by a decline in fish diversity and abundance (Wilson et al. 2006, 2019; Mumby and Steneck 2008; Paddack et al. 2009; Alvarez-Filip et al. 2015). The combination of words “fish AND coral AND complexity” in the title, abstract, and keywords of scientific papers within the Scopus database allowed us to identify at least 72 studies that inves
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