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Maladaptive behavior reinforces a recruitment bottleneck in newly settled fishes

  • Behavioral ecology - Original Paper
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Abstract

Settlement from the plankton ends the major dispersive stage of life for many marine organisms and exposes them to intense predation pressure in juvenile habitats. This predation mortality represents a life-history bottleneck that can determine recruitment success. At the level of individual predator–prey interactions, prey survival depends upon behavior, specifically how behavior affects prey conspicuousness and evasive ability. We conducted an experiment to identify behavioral traits and performance levels that are important determinants of which individuals survive or die soon after settlement. We measured a suite of behavioral traits on late stage, pre-settlement Ward's damsel (Pomacentrus wardi) collected using light traps. These behavioral traits included two measures of routine swimming (indicators of conspicuousness) and eight measures of escape performance to a visual startle stimulus. Fish were then released onto individual patch reefs, where divers measured an additional behavioral trait (boldness). We censused each patch reef until approximately 50% of the fish were missing (~24 h), which we assumed to be a result of predation. We used classification tree analysis to discriminate survivors from fish presumed dead based on poor behavioral performance. The classification tree revealed that individuals displaying the maladaptive combination of low escape response speed, low boldness on the reef, and high routine swimming speed were highly susceptible to predation (92.4% with this combination died within 24 h). This accounted for 55.2% of all fish that died. Several combinations of behavioral traits predicted likely survival over 24 h, but there was greater uncertainty about that prediction than there was for fish that were predicted to die. Thus maladaptive behavioral traits were easier to identify than adaptive traits.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ann Hogget, Lyle Vail and the staff of the Lizard Island Research Station, Queensland, Australia, for providing facilities and support for this research. We appreciate the assistance of students and researchers who sorted and shared their light trap catches: J. Moore, T. Holmes, J. Scannell, C. Goatley, S. DeJong, and P. Biro. At the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, Judy Mayo, Sid Aaron, and Lisa Havel analyzed video recordings. We thank A. Ojanguren, S. Nakayama, L. Havel, and E. Farrell for comments on the manuscript. This work was financially supported by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation to L.A.F. (grant number OCE-0425241), the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Endowment at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Experiments conducted in this study comply with the current laws of Australia where the work was conducted.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marine Science Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, 750 Channel View Drive, Port Aransas, TX, 78373, USA

    Lee A. Fuiman

  2. Australian Institute of Marine Science, UWA Ocean Sciences Centre (MO96), 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    Mark G. Meekan

  3. School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Townsville, QLD, 4811, Australia

    Mark I. McCormick

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  1. Lee A. Fuiman
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  2. Mark G. Meekan
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Correspondence to Lee A. Fuiman.

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Communicated by Jeff Shima.

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Fuiman, L.A., Meekan, M.G. & McCormick, M.I. Maladaptive behavior reinforces a recruitment bottleneck in newly settled fishes. Oecologia 164, 99–108 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-010-1712-3

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