Meeting Abstract
Understanding the factors that influence habitat use of coral reef organisms is increasingly important as reefs shift away from a structurally complex hard coral dominated community to a flattened soft coral / sponge dominated community. However, our ability to study fine scale habitat use of marked individuals has been limited to inferences drawn from periodic diver census data. Here we describe the benefits and limitations of using acoustic telemetry data to ascertain measures of den location, habitat use, daily home range, and social interactions for stoplight parrotfish and Caribbean spiny lobsters. Our study focused on a set of nearshore coral patch reefs in the middle Florida Keys with an array of 32 Vemco VR2 receivers placed in a hexagonal grid pattern. Individual lobsters and parrotfish were captured, tagged, and released over four summers from 2015-2018. Diver surveys provided quantitative estimates of reef substrate composition, reef fish abundance, and structural complexity for a majority of patch reefs within the array. Caribbean spiny lobsters show a clear pattern of homing to a common crevice shelter while often foraging at night in different patches of habitat. Terminal phase stoplight parrotfish tend to have a home range limited to one or two adjacent reefs which can overlap with other supermales. While the physical structure of patch reefs is clearly important to home range sizes and den locations of both lobsters and parrotfish, the abundance and species composition of live hard coral is not a strong predictor of their current habitat use. Thus, the flattening of coral reefs is likely to have significant impacts on the behavior and habitat use of reef organisms.
