Adaptive capacity of reef-associated fishes to Climate Change
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Climate Change Biology
- Keywords
- vulnerability to climate change, life history traits, resilience, Adaptive potencial index, Tropical Eastern Pacific, Mexican pacific ocean
- Copyright
- © 2018 Abas 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
- 2018. Adaptive capacity of reef-associated fishes to Climate Change. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26787v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26787v2
Abstract
Climate change is affecting the structure and function of marine communities in the eastern Pacific, and to anticipate possible consequences of these modifications, a better understanding of the natural adaptation potential of the species is needed. This study aimed to build a metric of adaptive capacity of reef fishes, and evaluate it using data from fish assemblages from 12 rocky and coral reefs of western Mexico. The index was developed using six life history traits from 719 fish-species distributed along the tropical Eastern Pacific. Our results indicated low adaptive capacity for big sized carnivore fish such as the tunas, totoaba and most groupers (Mycteroperca spp.); conversely, high values were attributed to species with fast life strategies such as anchovies, gobies, and blennies. The application of the index to census data showed that the adaptive potential of fish assemblages had an inverse latitudinal trend (higher in the southern reefs), resulting from the abundance of large-sized carnivores in the central and northern Gulf of California, and of small herbivores in the tropical region. As the index allows to estimate reef-fish species and communities' adaptive capacity in a straightforward and simple way, it may be a useful tool for marine conservation.
Author Comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the WCMB.
The previous version of the Preprint was published with two typing errors, which have now been modified and corrected.