“…Reefs dominated by dead coral may also be less productive than our model predicts due to ecosystem consequences relating to losses of live coral obligates that we do not explicitly consider. A number of reef fish species preferentially recruit to live corals (Coker, Graham, & Pratchett, 2012;Feary, Almany, McCormick, & Jones, 2007;McCormick, Moore, & Munday, 2010), others depend on acoustic settlement cues provided by healthy reef habitats (Simpson, Meekan, Montgomery, McCauley, & Jeffs, 2005), and others still use live corals for predator avoidance cues (McCormick, Chivers, Allan, & Ferrari, 2016;McCormick & Lönnstedt, 2016) and food (Pratchett, Wilson, Baird, et al, 2006). The prevalence of coral specialists in the reef fish assemblage, their trophic importance, and the extent to which they are replaced by more generalist species when live corals die will ultimately determine whether food web dynamics and fisheries productivity will be negatively affected by their loss.…”