Inshore Fishes of Howland Island, Baker Island, Jarvis Island, Palmyra Atoll, and Kingman Reef

Abstract

A list is given of shore fishes known from Howland and Baker Islands, outliers of the Phoenix Islands group, and Jarvis Island, Palmyra Atoll, and Kingman Reef in the Line Islands group. The list was compiled from literature sources, museum collection databases, and surveys conducted in 2000-2008 by the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center's Coral Reef Ecosystem Division (CRED). A total of 506 shore-fish species and 27 epipelagic species were recorded from the five islands. Of the shore-fish species, 41 (8.1%) were first noted in our CRED surveys. Numbers for the individual islands are: Howland Island-328 species of which 166 (50.8%) are first records from CRED sampling; Baker Island-268 species with 188 (70.1%) as new CRED records; Jarvis Island-274 species with 176 (64.2%) as new CRED records; Palmyra Atoll-395 species with 113 (28.6%) as new CRED records; and Kingman Reef-270 species with 212 (78.5%) as new CRED records. Fifteen additional species whose identifications are in need of verification were reported in our surveys or previous efforts. An additional 16 are considered suspect identifications of species that probably do not occur at the Line or Phoenix Islands. Differences in the species composition of the five islands are discussed in the context of habitat diversity, historic sampling effort, and regional oceanography. The evolution of shore-fish species found at these central Pacific islands is reviewed in the context of phylogeographic information, geology of Pacific islands, and regional oceanography. It is argued that oceanography and dispersal have played a larger role than geologic adjacencies in the evolution of central Pacific oceanic island fishes. Knowledge of the fish fauna of the central equatorial Pacific remains incomplete, in part, because of limited sampling of small, nocturnal, or otherwise cryptic species. These five islands are

At Palmyra Atoll, the fish‐community environmental DNA signal changes across habitats but not with tides

“…Coverage was likely improved for this study because it had four measures per sample (filter and filtrate X MiFish 12S Universal and MiFish 12S Elasmobranch). Still, the eDNA from 127 species detected in the five reef samples barely approached the 395 cumulative fish species documented at Palmyra Atoll (Mundy et al ., 2010). This is in part because eDNA sampling of this study is a snapshot in time.…”

Spatial scaling properties of coral reef benthic communities

“…Plating and branching corals are susceptible to breakage and dislodgement by high wave energy (Madin et al 2014), whereas encrusting, digitate and massive coral morphologies are more wave‐resistant and dominate in more wave‐exposed areas (Gove et al 2015). Branching corals also dominated sections of Howland and Baker's north‐eastern to south‐eastern coasts, which are sheltered from winter storm swells from the north–west (Mundy et al 2010). In contrast, Palmyra's northern coast is exposed to north–west winter swells (Williams et al 2013) and here we saw spatial clustering of more wave‐tolerant encrusting and corymbose corals.…”

Effects of isolation and fishing on the marine ecosystems of Easter Island and Salas y Gómez, Chile

“…Guam, Palau) have well over 1000 fish species present (Myers, ), while comparable isolated, high latitude islands (e.g. Lord Howe – 433, Pitcairn – 370, Howland – 328) have two to three times the richness observed at Easter Island (Francis, ; Randall, ; Mundy et al ., ). Despite this exceptionally low richness, numerical abundance, and biomass are comparable with other remote locations in the Pacific (Sandin et al ., ; Williams et al ., )…”