Prior residency improves the performance of a habitat specialist in a degrading environment

Poulos, Davina E., and McCormick, Mark I. (2022) Prior residency improves the performance of a habitat specialist in a degrading environment. Coral Reefs, 41 (2). pp. 423-433.

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Abstract

The effect of habitat loss on the decline of habitat specialists has been well documented in coral reef fishes, since they have a restricted habitat preference. However, the different competitive advantages of specialists and generalists can impact their performance within varying habitat conditions. The order in which species arrive into a community influences competitive outcomes; these ‘priority effects’ may modify communities within degrading resource scenarios as individuals migrate in search of higher quality resources. In this study, we investigated: how sequence and timing of arrival affects interactions between a habitat generalist and a specialist in healthy and degrading environments, and how prior residency interacts with habitat quality and species identity to affect propensity to migrate. We conducted manipulative field studies using the damselfishes Pomacentrus amboinensis, a habitat generalist, and Pomacentrus moluccensis, a live coral specialist, on live or dead coral habitats, with timing of arrival differing between early and late arrivers (residents and intruders, respectively) by 1, 3 or 24 h. Our results demonstrated that the strength of priority effects (i.e., aggression intensity) increased with increasing timing of arrival when the P. moluccensis arrived after P. amboinensis, suggesting that as the perceived value of the habitat patch increased (owing to increasing ownership duration and defence investment), the tendency to defend it increased. Propensity to migrate from dead to live coral was greater for P. moluccensis compared to P. amboinensis; however, arriving after P. amboinensis significantly reduced willingness to migrate to its preferred live coral habitat, indicating an inhibitory priority effect, directly affecting future persistence. The degree that ecological versatility and priority effects combine to modify competitive outcomes in coral reef fishes has important consequences for the persistence of specialist species in the face of environmental degradation, and has implications for predicting how our changing environment will affect fish communities.

Item ID: 74564
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1432-0975
Keywords: Aggression, Competition, Habitat quality, Habitat specialisation, Migration, Priority effect
Copyright Information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Date Deposited: 16 Nov 2022 23:18
FoR Codes: 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4101 Climate change impacts and adaptation > 410102 Ecological impacts of climate change and ecological adaptation @ 30%
31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310301 Behavioural ecology @ 30%
31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310305 Marine and estuarine ecology (incl. marine ichthyology) @ 40%
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