Identifying zooplankton community changes between shallow and upper-mesophotic reefs on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, Caribbean
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Aquaculture, Fisheries and Fish Science, Biodiversity, Ecology, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- mesophotic, MCE, Utila, Honduras, zooplankton, twilight zone, coral reef, light trap, Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, depth changes
- Copyright
- © 2016 Andradi-Brown et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Identifying zooplankton community changes between shallow and upper-mesophotic reefs on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, Caribbean. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2531v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2531v1
Abstract
Mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs, reefs 30 -150m) are understudied, yet the limited research conducted has been biased towards large sessile taxa, such as scleractinian corals and sponges, or mobile taxa such as fish. Here we investigate zooplankton communities on shallow reefs and MCEs around Utila, on the southern Mesoamerican Barrier Reef using planktonic light traps. Zooplankton samples were sorted into broad taxonomic groups. Our results indicate similar taxonomic zooplankton richness and overall biomass between shallow reefs and MCEs, but that abundance of larger bodied (>2 mm) zooplanktonic groups, including decapod crab zoea, mysid shrimps and peracarid crustaceans was higher on MCEs than shallow reefs. Our findings highlight the important of considering zooplankton when identifying broader reef community shifts across the shallow reef to MCE depth gradient.
Author Comment
This short manuscript considers differences in recorded zooplankton communities on shallow reefs (15 m) and mesophotic coral ecosystems (MCEs; 40 m) on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, Caribbean. We plan to shortly submit this article for peer review, but this version is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.