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Coralline Hills: high complexity reef habitats on seamount summits of the Vitória-Trindade Chain

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Abstract

Seamounts and oceanic islands play an important role as biodiversity hotspots amid the vastness of the oligotrophic open ocean. While island ecology and evolution have received a lot of attention in the last decades, the exploration and understanding of community and habitat dynamics of seamounts remain challenging. Here, we investigate the ecology and biogeography of fish and benthic communities of a recently discovered southwestern Atlantic reef system at Davis seamount. This seamount belongs to the Vitória-Trindade Chain and is located in international waters off the Brazilian coast. We present this reef system, that also occurs on other shallow seamounts of the chain, as a new reef habitat named “Coralline Hills”: Its hill-shaped structure is mainly built by crustose coralline algae and rises up from the seamount summit at 60–70 m to 17 m depth. The benthic community is mainly composed by coralline algae and sponges. Fish biomass at Davis coralline hill is dominated by carnivores, mainly top predators such as nurse sharks and large groupers. The relatively shallow reef top presents higher species richness, abundance and distinct trophic structure (mostly omnivore and planktivore species) than the mesophotic zone (with higher abundance of carnivorous fishes). A biogeographic analysis revealed that the reef fish community structure is greatly influenced by a set of dispersal and establishment traits that strongly differs from that encountered on coastal reefs of the central Brazilian coast and on insular reefs of Trindade Island. Gathering information about the ecology and structure of such unique and remote habitat is timely, since the region is under imminent threat such as fishing and mining and lacks international attention.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Fundação Grupo O Boticário de Proteção a Natureza (project #1088-20171), the Hope for Reefs Initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, grants 470725/2009-5 and 557043/2009-3) for funding. We are indebted with the Brazilian Navy, the scientific program PROTRINDADE, the Parque Nacional Marinho dos Abrolhos, the crew of the Parati II (Igor, Tamara, Maurício and Val) and the Abaeté, Mauritius V. Bell and Cristina Castillo for fieldwork assistance and permits. Some silhouettes in Fig. 1 were downloaded from phylopic.org under a Public Domain 1.0 license, otherwise under CC BY-SA 3.0, BY-NC 3.0 and BY-NC-SA 3.0 licenses (https://creativecommons.org/licenses) credited to Lily Hughes, Mason McNair, Noah Schlottman, Casey Dunn, Michelle Site, Jonathan Wells, Didier Descouens and T. Michael. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior–Brasil (CAPES)—finance code 001. CRP also thanks Espírito Santo Research and Innovation Foundation (FAPES) for the PhD scholarship, and HTP thanks Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) (grants 2019/24215-2; 2021/07039-6). We thank Stuart Sandin and three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on this manuscript. This contribution is dedicated to the memory of our great friend and colleague Thiony Simon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Oceanografia e Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória, 29075-910, Brazil

    Helder Coelho Guabiroba, Jean-Christophe Joyeux, Caio R. Pimentel, João Batista Teixeira, Raphael M. Macieira, Ryan Andrades, Eric Mazzei & Thiony Simon

  2. California Academy of Sciences, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA, 94118, USA

    Luiz A. Rocha & Hudson T. Pinheiro

  3. Associação Ambiental Voz da Natureza, Vitória, Espírito Santo, 29010-002, Brazil

    João Batista Teixeira & Hudson T. Pinheiro

  4. Instituto de Biodiversidade e Sustentabilidade (NUPEM), Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Macaé, 27910-970, Brazil

    João Luiz Gasparini & Thiago J. F. Costa

  5. Center for Marine Biology, University of São Paulo, São Sebastião, 11600-000, Brazil

    Ronaldo Bastos Francini-Filho & Hudson T. Pinheiro

  6. Departamento de Biologia Marinha, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, 24210-201, Brazil

    Marina Sissini

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  1. Helder Coelho Guabiroba
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Correspondence to Hudson T. Pinheiro.

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Post-acceptance note

The Brazilian Agency for Mining (Agência Nacional de Mineração - ANM) shows on its Internet site “Sistema de Informações Geográficas da Mineração -SIGMINE” (Geographic Information System for Mining; https://geo.anm.gov.br/portal/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=6a8f5ccc4b6a4c2bba79759aa952d908) that it has been accepting exploration claims for phosphate and ‘calcareous shells’ mining on diverse south western Atlantic seamounts starting 2020 and 2021. Authorizations allow industrial research (prior to actual mining) on Brazilian EEZ seamounts Hotspur (off northern Abrolhos Bank), Vitória and Montague (on the Vitoria-Trindade Chain; VTC), and Davis (also on the VTC but in international waters of the pretended Extended Brazilian EEZ).

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Guabiroba, H.C., Rocha, L.A., Joyeux, JC. et al. Coralline Hills: high complexity reef habitats on seamount summits of the Vitória-Trindade Chain. Coral Reefs 41, 1075–1086 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-022-02269-0

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