Benefits of herbivorous fish outweigh costs of corallivory in coral nurseries placed close to a Kenyan patch reef

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Authors

Ewout G. Knoester¹ , Albertinka J. Murk¹ , Ronald Osinga¹

1. Wageningen University & Research

Conference / event

11th WIOMSA Scientific Symposium, July 2019 (Reduit, Mauritius)

Poster summary

The net effects of herbivorous and coral-predating fish on coral growth, coral condition and fouling in nurseries was investigated by a cage-exclusion experiment in Kenya. A 100-fold increase in macroalgae was found in caged nurseries, which lead to lower growth and condition of the corals. Uncaged nurseries were kept clean predominantly by the grazing of the bristletooth Ctenochaetus striatus. Only 10% of all coral fragments showed some predation marks throughout the study. Overall, this study shows that the benefits of fouling control outweigh the costs of incidental coral predation in coral nurseries. It is recommended to place coral nurseries close to reefs to make use of the benefits provided by the fish community.

Keywords

Coral gardening, Reef restoration, Coral predation, Herbivory, Acropora, Fouling

Research areas

Biological Sciences, Ocean Sciences, Ecology and Forestry, Environmental Sciences

References

1. Knoester, E. G., Murk, A. J., & Osinga, R. (2019). Benefits of herbivorous fish outweigh costs of corallivory in coral nurseries placed close to a Kenyan patch reef. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 611, 143-155.

Funding

No data provided

Supplemental files

1. Published article   Download

Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests were disclosed.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 Knoester et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.