Understanding the Spatio-Temporal Response of Coral Reef Fish Communities to Natural Disturbances: Insights from Beta-Diversity Decomposition

Lamy, Thomas; Legendre, Pierre; Chancerelle, Yannick; Siu, Gilles; Claudet, Joachim

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0138696

Cited by 58 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(85 reference statements)

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“…Many studies have shown positive short‐term responses of parrotfish demography (notably abundance) to a variety of disturbances on coral reefs (e.g., Adam et al, ; Gilmour, Smith, Heyward, Baird, & Pratchett, ; Lamy, Legendre, Chancerelle, Siu, & Claudet, ; Lindahl, Öhman, & Schelten, ; Russ et al, ; Wilson, Graham, Pratchett, Jones, & Polunin, ), including coral bleaching events, destructive blast fishing, storms, cyclones, and predation by crown‐of‐thorns starfish. These studies also include bleaching events in our localities in the CA (Sheppard, Spalding, Bradshaw, & Wilson, ) and on the GBR (Emslie & Pratchett, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous biological feedbacks in parrotfishes associated with pantropical coral bleaching

Taylor

Benkwitt

Choat

et al. 2019

Global Change Biology

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Biological feedbacks generated through patterns of disturbance are vital for sustaining ecosystem states. Recent ocean warming and thermal anomalies have caused pantropical episodes of coral bleaching, which has led to widespread coral mortality and a range of subsequent effects on coral reef communities. Although the response of many reef‐associated fishes to major disturbance events on coral reefs is negative (e.g., reduced abundance and condition), parrotfishes show strong feedbacks after disturbance to living reef structure manifesting as increases in abundance. However, the mechanisms underlying this response are poorly understood. Using biochronological reconstructions of annual otolith (ear stone) growth from two ocean basins, we tested whether parrotfish growth was enhanced following bleaching‐related coral mortality, thus providing an organismal mechanism for demographic changes in populations. Both major feeding guilds of parrotfishes (scrapers and excavators) exhibited enhanced growth of individuals after bleaching that was decoupled from expected thermal performance, a pattern that was not evident in other reef fish taxa from the same environment. These results provide evidence for a more nuanced ecological feedback system—one where disturbance plays a key role in mediating parrotfish–benthos interactions. By influencing the biology of assemblages, disturbance can thereby stimulate change in parrotfish grazing intensity and ultimately reef geomorphology over time. This feedback cycle operated historically at within‐reef scales; however, our results demonstrate that the scale, magnitude, and severity of recent thermal events are entraining the biological responses of disparate communities to respond in synchrony. This may fundamentally alter feedbacks in the relationships between parrotfishes and reef systems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous biological feedbacks in parrotfishes associated with pantropical coral bleaching

Taylor

Benkwitt

Choat

et al. 2019

Global Change Biology

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“…Fish aggregate in areas of moderate to high coral cover but the implication of these findings is that biomass itself is the cause of the diversity not the coral refuge. In support of this contention, a number of studies have found that fish are more resilient to losses of coral cover than expected from correlation analyses (Gra-ham et al 2008, Friedlander et al 2014, Lamy et al 2015. This provocative finding indicates the difficulties in evaluating the possible causation, interdependencies, time lags, and feedback in complex ecosystems.…”

Section: Number Of Speciesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Managing coral reef fish community biomass is a priority for biodiversity conservation in Madagascar

McClanahan¹,

Jadot²

2017

Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser.

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Elucidating factors that influence natural resources and diversity can assist managing species and their ecological functions. Key management options include protecting unique locations or implementing restrictions that more broadly protect ecological attributes and their services. To evaluate these 2 options, we examined 23 fish families in 152 unique sites in the Western and Northern Madagascar Ecoregion to test for spatial aggregation, environmental, habitat, and human influences on the fish communities. We found that there were 10 distinct communities of fish and that they were widely distributed in the region. Biomass and diversity were closely associated with the community types and showed weak spatial aggregation and environmental and market influences. Further, fishable biomass was only weakly positively associated with habitat characteristics of depth and soft coral cover and negatively associated with erect algae (R 2 = 0.06). Biomass was the strongest predictor of number of species whereas associations with light and hard coral cover were weak and median sea surface temperature (SST) and water depth had the weakest influences (all variable R 2 = 0.41). Given the weak spatial aggregation, environmental influences, high spatial and species variability, we suggest that there are few conservation priority locations. Consequently, for ecological representation and function there is a need for broad-scale spatial management that captures this heterogeneity and maintains reef fish biomass. The status of reefs in this ecoregion was fair with ~65% of the study sites having biomass > 600 kg ha −1 .

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“…With the continued migration of both ecological research and applied biodiversity conservation towards a more integrative, metacommunity framework (Leibold et al, ), there has been an overwhelming increase of interest in the measurement (Anderson et al, ; Tuomisto, ), underpinning mechanisms (Baselga, ; Chase & Myers, ), and benefits of beta diversity (Lamy, Legendre, Chancerelle, Siu, & Claudet, ; van der Plas et al, ), or the variation in species composition among localities. Beta diversity provides a broader picture of diversity because it shows the connection between alpha (or local) diversity and gamma (or regional) diversity (Socolar, Gilroy, Kunin, & Edwards, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beta diversity response to stress severity and heterogeneity in sensitive versus tolerant stream diatoms

Pound

Lawrence

Passy

2018

Diversity and Distributions

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Aim Severity and heterogeneity of stress are major constraints of beta diversity, but their relative influence is poorly understood. Here, we addressed this question by examining the patterns of beta diversity in stress‐sensitive versus stress‐tolerant stream diatoms and their response to local versus regional factors along gradients of stress severity and heterogeneity. Location The Adirondack region of New York. Methods Beta diversity was measured as multivariate dispersion of communities across high stress, low stress, and high + low stress (heterogeneous) environments, encompassing 200 stream samples. Null models were implemented to assess community similarity relative to randomly assembled communities and the importance of local assembly processes versus the regional species pool. Results The overall beta diversity was influenced by a combination of severity and heterogeneity of stress, while beta diversity of sensitive species increased with heterogeneity. Beta diversity of tolerant species did not vary with either severity or heterogeneity of stress. Heterogeneity decreased community similarity relative to the null expectation in all groups of species. Stress reduced the importance of local assembly mechanisms for the overall beta diversity and sensitive species beta diversity. In contrast, the importance of local assembly mechanisms increased with stress regarding beta diversity of tolerant species. Main conclusions Beta diversity responded to both severity and heterogeneity of stress, but turnover along these gradients was mostly driven by sensitive species. The overall beta diversity and beta diversity of sensitive species became more constrained by the depauperate regional species pool, as opposed to local assembly mechanisms. While heterogeneous stress contributed to beta diversity, severe stress suppressed beta diversity through elimination of sensitive species. Therefore, an increase in beta diversity in an environmentally‐stressed region may serve as a forewarning for future loss of sensitive species, should the stress continue to intensify.

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Understanding the Spatio-Temporal Response of Coral Reef Fish Communities to Natural Disturbances: Insights from Beta-Diversity Decomposition

Cited by 58 publications

References 66 publications

Synchronous biological feedbacks in parrotfishes associated with pantropical coral bleaching

Synchronous biological feedbacks in parrotfishes associated with pantropical coral bleaching

Managing coral reef fish community biomass is a priority for biodiversity conservation in Madagascar

Beta diversity response to stress severity and heterogeneity in sensitive versus tolerant stream diatoms

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