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Environmental stochasticity of spatiotemporal recruitment patterns in coral reef fish (Tahiti, French Polynesia)
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Edité par CCSD ; Coastal Education and Research Foundation -
International audience. The densities of coral reef fish juveniles often vary temporally due to different spawning and recruitment periodsthroughout the year and spatially due to the quality of nursery habitats. Juveniles carefully select their nursery habitatbased on numerous factors, notably environmental parameters and the presence or absence of predators or conspecifics.To identify environmental and ecological factors that controls the juvenile fish distributions, fish populations andphysicochemical water parameters were characterised from May to December 2020 on five contrasting habitats along thecoastline of Tahiti (French Polynesia). Although juvenile fish diversity varied between the five habitats, density did notsignificantly differ from site to site. It emerged that density was strongly linked to temporal recruitment periods but wasalso positively correlated to the presence of adult conspecifics; thus differing from the common preference for zones withfewer adults. Water parameters were also linked to juvenile distributions, with more juveniles of all species in warmerwater, and more herbivore juveniles in lower pH conditions. The nutrient loads did not have significant effects onjuvenile densities. Overall, this study highlights that, beyond widely studied factors such as habitat type and adultpopulations, certain physicochemical parameters can also be indicative of juvenile fish distributions on coastal nurseryhabitats.
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