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Pocillopora damicornis-associated echinoderm fauna: richness and community structure across the southern Mexican Pacific

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Abstract

The reef-associated echinoderm cryptofauna has received scarce attention notwithstanding its large-scale effects on reef community structures and ecosystem functioning world-wide. In the present study, a spatially hierarchical quantitative sampling protocol was designed to address Pocillopora damicornis-associated echinoderm diversity within and across southern Mexican Pacific reef localities. It was also aimed to evaluate if species composition and abundance varies across several spatial scales. The number of sampled echinoderm species from 36 P. damicornis coral heads was 24, which fell inside the 95 % confidence interval of the Chao1 species richness estimator, while as many as 42 species were expected to occur. The analysis indicated that the echinoderm diversity was not particularly large among the samples (4–6 species) or across localities (5–12 species). Nevertheless, the observed associated echinoderm richness resulted from a small, although significant, species replacement among the coral heads and reef localities across the southern Mexican Pacific. The relative large number of echinoderms associated with P. damicornis may serve as a proxy for predicting potential biodiversity loss caused by the coral reef degradation currently observed in the study area.

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Acknowledgments

The authors express their enormous gratitude to numerous students and colleagues that help us to collect and sort the biological material, to Cuauhtemoc Aparicio (CICIMAR) for carefully managing the database, to Maria L. Rodríguez and Karen L. Flores (UMAR) for obtaining biomass data and to Daniel Lopez (UMAR) for drawing the maps. The work was funded by Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (HJ029) and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (236654) granted to ALP. Permit DGOPA.04552.040711.1798 granted by SAGARPA allowed us to collect coral heads in the studied area. The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Hidrobiología, División CBS, UAM-Iztapalapa, San Rafael Atlixco 186, Col, Vicentina, 09340, Ciudad de México, México

    Andrés López-Pérez

  2. Doctorado en Ciencias Biológicas y de la Salud, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, San Rafael Atlixco 186, Col, Vicentina, CP 09340, Ciudad de México, México

    Rebeca Granja-Fernández

  3. Instituto de Recursos, Universidad del Mar, Campus Puerto Ángel, 70902, San Pedro Pochutla, Puerto Ángel, Oaxaca, México

    Francisco Benítez-Villalobos

  4. Programa de Licenciatura en Biología Marina, Universidad del Mar, Campus Puerto Ángel, 70902, San Pedro Pochutla, Puerto Ángel,Oaxaca, México

    Octavio Jiménez-Antonio

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  1. Andrés López-Pérez
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  2. Rebeca Granja-Fernández
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  3. Francisco Benítez-Villalobos
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Correspondence to Andrés López-Pérez.

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Communicated by B. W. Hoeksema

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López-Pérez, A., Granja-Fernández, R., Benítez-Villalobos, F. et al. Pocillopora damicornis-associated echinoderm fauna: richness and community structure across the southern Mexican Pacific. Mar Biodiv 47, 481–490 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12526-016-0489-y

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