Hobbs, J-P. A., Jones, G.P., and Munday, P.L. (2011) Extinction risk in endemic marine fishes. Conservation Biology, 25 (5). pp. 1053-1055.

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Abstract

[Extract] Developing effective management strategies for conserving species requires identifying the species with the greatest probability of extinction and determining why the probabilities are high. In terrestrial systems, endemic island species have the highest rates of extinctions (Frankham 1998; Whittaker 1998). Endemic species have high probabilities of extinction because they typically have both a small range size and low abundance (Gaston 1998). The tendency of local abundance to increase as a species' geographic range increases has been observed across a wide range of taxa (Brown 1984; Gaston et al. 1997; McKinney 1997). However, this relationship has rarely been tested rigorously for marine assemblages because data are lacking.

We studied this relationship with data for reef fishes. Their taxonomy and distribution is reasonably well known and their life history is typical of most marine species. The majority of reef fishes have a dispersive larval phase, followed by recruitment to, or near, a reef, where juveniles settle, grow, mature, and reproduce with high fecundities (Sale 1980). There are thousands of coral reef fishes, including a large number of endemic species, and they attain their greatest diversity in Indonesian waters, where they form the world's most species-rich vertebrate assemblages (Jones et al. 2002).

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