Fig 1.
Map of study sites around Utila, Honduras.
Survey locations are marked, with numbers indicating sites as follows: (1) Spotted Bay, (2) The Maze, (3) Stingray Point, (4) Little Bight, (5) Black Coral Wall, (6) Coral View and (7) Lighthouse Reef. Inset map shows the location of Utila relative to the Caribbean region. Map sourced from GADM database of Global Administrative Areas under a CC BY licence with permission.
Fig 2.
Changes in fish communities with depth.
(A) Species richness, (B) abundance, (C) biomass down the depth gradient. Figure shows mean and SE. Letters indicate statistically different groups at the p<0.05 level.
Fig 3.
Change in percentage cover of key benthic groups with depth.
Figure shows mean and SE, letters indicate differences (p>0.05 with one-way ANOVA).
Fig 4.
Non-metric multidimensional scaling plot of fish biomass weighted communities for each depth and site.
(A) Overall NMDS plot showing community clustering by depth, contour lines indicate percentage cover of hard coral and (B) fish community biomass standardised by percentage hard coral availability at each site.
Table 1.
Testing the effects of hard substrata, shore, site and depth on the recorded fish community using PERMANOVA.
Fig 5.
Change in percentage of different trophic groups with depth.
Fish community was weighed by (A) abundance and (B) biomass. Percentage abundance and biomass of each trophic group was calculated by summing all fish identified on all transects at all sites in a depth band.
Table 2.
Comparison of fish trophic groups between 5m and 40m depths across all sites.
Table 3.
Species correlating with changes in their trophic group with depth.
Fig 6.
Whole fish community length distributions at each depth across all transects and sites.
Number of fish lengths recorded (n), and the separation bandwidths to produce kernel density estimates (h) calculated by Sheather-Jones selection procedure are shown.
Fig 7.
Comparison of kernel density estimates for four fish species between shallow and deep reefs.
Comparisons based on all fish individuals measured on shallow (5 and 15m) and deep reefs (25 and 40m) at all sites. Grey shaded regions represent one standard error either side of the null model, n = number of individual fish measured, p indicates whether the length distributions are significantly different based on permutation tests.