Fig 1.
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) monthly sea surface temperature inside and outside Al Wajh Bank, averaged from June 2002 to May 2017.
Transparent range indicates standard error. p < 0.05 (paired two-tailed t-test, α = 0.05) between inside and outside for all months except September.
Fig 2.
Map of Al Wajh Bank and sites surveyed.
Created using ESRI World Imagery basemap. Sources: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, i-cubed, USDA FSA, USGS, AEX, Getmapping, Aerogrid, IGN, IGP, swisstopo, and the GIS User Community.
Table 1.
Site location and benthic properties.
Table 2.
Biodiversity metrics at each site, for the underwater visual survey (UVS), ichthyocide survey, and the combined dataset from both methods.
Fig 3.
Rank ordered species abundance per transect.
CV is shown for species comprising 80% of the total abundance in Al Wajh Bank. Survey site most associated with nine highly localized species are shown.
Fig 4.
nMDS of Bray-Curtis dissimilarity distances.
(a) Al Wajh sites based on both UVS and ichthyocide surveys. Stress: 0.1631. (b) Al Wajh sites (blue) and Coker et al. [29] sites (red) based only on ichthyocide surveys. Stress: 0.2064.
Fig 5.
Rarefaction curves for UVS transects, ichthyocide stations, and combined results based on (a) sites and (b) individual fishes observed.
Table 3.
SIMPER analysis of conspicuous species between our Al Wajh surveys and fish data obtained from Roberts et al. [20].
Table 4.
SIMPER analysis of cryptic species between our Al Wajh surveys and fish data obtained from Coker et al. [29].
Table 5.
Composition of benthic habitat in Al Wajh Bank across each site.
Fig 6.
Comparison of species diversity in each fish family for both survey methods against known species in the Red Sea based on Golani and Fricke [43].