Table 1.
Percentage of Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGRRA) fish surveys in 17 state/territories (as referred to by AGRRA) carried out in different coral reef habitats between 1997 and 2004 where parrotfishes were the dominant family in terms of biomass and where parrotfish biomass exceeded that of highly valued commercial fish groups.
Figure 1.
Location of 348 Atlantic Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGRRA) surveys across the Caribbean region carried out between 1998 and 2004 and involving the use of ten 60 m2 transects.
Red dots indicate sites that exhibit either effective full or partial protection against fishing. Green dots indicate sites that are either unprotected, or with ineffective protection, or of unknown protection effectiveness status. Fishing protection effectiveness categories are based on [7] and [60]. Table 2 provides additional information on the location of the sampling sites.
Table 2.
Sampling batch ID, location, year code, average latitude and longitude (decimal degrees) coordinates and number (n) of Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment (AGRRA) surveys included in the analyses.
Table 3.
Summary statistics for fish biomass (grams per 100 m2), fish density (fish per 100 m2) and average fish weight (grams per fish) for different fish groups across reef-surveys allocated to two categories of protection effectiveness against fishing.
Figure 2.
Scatter-plots showing relationships between human population size and fish density for selected fish groups across the Caribbean (top panels) and the coefficient of variation, a measure inversely related to precision, associated with the fish density estimates for each fish group (bottom panels).
Selected fish groups are a) snappers (n = 226), b) groupers (n = 260), c) highly valued commercial species (n = 269), and c) parrotfishes (n = 274). Spearman rank correlation coefficients between human population size and the fish metrics are shown, along with the corresponding adjusted degrees of freedom and p-values. Loess smoother black lines were fitted to the data to help visualize trends. Horizontal lines in bottom panels indicate the average coefficient of variation for the fish density estimates of each fish group across all surveys. Fish densities and human population size have been fourth-root transformed before plotting (thus, these axes are plotted on a fourth-root transformed scale), but numbers shown on axes represent back-transformed values. See Table S1 for details on species making up these fish groups.
Figure 3.
Scatter-plots showing relationships between human population size and fish biomass (top panels) and average fish weight (bottom panels) for selected fish groups across the Caribbean.
Selected fish groups are a) snappers (n = 226), b) groupers (n = 260), c) highly valued commercial species (n = 269), and c) parrotfishes (n = 274). Spearman rank correlation coefficients between human population size and the fish metrics are shown, along with the corresponding adjusted degrees of freedom and p-values. Loess smoother black dotted lines were fitted to the data to help visualize trends. All variables have been fourth-root transformed before plotting (thus, all axes are plotted on a fourth-root transformed scale), but numbers shown on axes represent back-transformed values. See Table S1 for details on species making up these fish groups.
Figure 4.
Box-and-whisker plots comparing a) fish biomass, b) fish density and c) average fish weight between reef sites fully/partially protected from fishing (white boxes) and sites unprotected or of unknown protection status (grey boxes) throughout the Caribbean region for snappers (SNP), groupers (GRP), highly valued commercial species (COM) and parrotfishes (PAR).
Dots on bottom and top of whiskers represent 5 and 95 percentiles, respectively. All fish metrics have been fourth-root transformed before plotting (thus, vertical axes are plotted on a fourth-root transformed scale), but numbers shown on axes represent back-transformed values. mns- indicates marginally non-significant difference (p<0.1) between protection categories. *-indicates significant difference (p<0.05) between protection categories for a given fish group. See Table S1 for details on species making up these fish groups.
Table 4.
Results of PermANOVA comparing fish biomass, fish density and average fish weight for different fish groups between reef-surveys in sites with Full/partial protection against fishing and those in sites with Unprotected/unknown protection status.
Figure 5.
Relationships between human population size and average fish weight and relative fish density of individual parrotfish species across the Caribbean.
a) Spearman rank correlation coefficients (+95% one-tailed upper confidence interval; black circles) between human population size and the average fish weight for eight frequently occurring parrotfish species across the Caribbean; the correlation coefficients are ordered as a function maximum body length for each species (as reported by [41]); grey line illustrates the relationship between the magnitude of the correlation coefficients and body size; the eight correlation values were incorporated into one summary correlation coefficient (+95% one-tailed confidence interval; black square); see Table 5 for number of reef-surveys included in the correlation analysis for each species. b) Plot illustrating fish density scores of eight frequently occurring parrotfish species along one redundancy analysis axis representing a gradient of human population size; the species scores were obtained by constraining the species composition of the parrotfish assemblage by human population size across the Caribbean region; the size of the circles representing the species is proportional to the maximum body length of each species (n = 274 reef-surveys).
Table 5.
Summary statistics for average fish weight (grams per fish), fish density (fish per 100 m2) and fish biomass (grams per 100 m2) of eight frequently occurring parrotfish species across reef-surveys with Unprotected/unknown protection status (n = 274).