Hunt CL et al. (2020), Shelter use interactions of invasive lionfish w...

ECB-ART-49653

PLoS One 2020 Jan 01;158:e0236200. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236200.

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Shelter use interactions of invasive lionfish with commercially and ecologically important native invertebrates on Caribbean coral reefs.

Hunt CL , Andradi-Brown DA , Hudson CJ , Bennett-Williams J , Noades F , Curtis-Quick J , Lewis OT , Exton DA .

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Indo-Pacific lionfish have become invasive throughout the western Atlantic. Their predatory effects have been the focus of much research and are suggested to cause declines in native fish abundance and diversity across the invaded range. However, little is known about their non-consumptive effects, or their effects on invertebrates. Lionfish use shelters on the reef, thus there is potential for competition with other shelter-dwelling organisms. We demonstrate similar habitat associations between invasive lionfish, native spiny lobsters (Panulirus argus) and native long-spined sea urchins (Diadema antillarum), indicating the potential for competition. We then used a laboratory experiment to compare activity and shelter use of each species when alone and when lionfish were paired with each native species. Spiny lobsters increased their activity but did not change their shelter use in the presence of a lionfish, whilst long-spined sea urchins changed neither their activity nor shelter use. However, lionfish reduced their shelter use in the presence of spiny lobsters and long-spined sea urchins. This study highlights the importance not only of testing for the non-consumptive effects of invasive species, but also exploring whether native species exert non-consumptive effects on the invasive.

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	Fig 1. Habitat Assessment Score (HAS) table.This is a modified version of the HAS table [64] that indicates the criteria for each HAS value. Higher HAS values represent greater complexity.
	Fig 2. Lobster inside the shelter in the trial tank.
	Fig 3. Non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination of reef quadrat complexity.Each point represents a 1 x 1 m quadrat that is either a randomly sampled background quadrat (n = 36), or contains a lionfish (n = 35), lobster (n = 28) or Diadema (n = 22). The plot was constructed using values of the six HAS categories: rugosity, variety of growth forms, substratum height, maximum refuge size, percentage live cover and percentage hard substratum. Quadrats with more similar complexity are closer together on the plot. Vectors indicate the direction of the gradient for each HAS category.
	Fig 4. Habitat Assessment Score (HAS) joyplot.HAS are plotted for background (n = 36), lionfish (n = 35), lobster (n = 28) and Diadema (n = 22) quadrats. Larger HAS represents greater complexity. HAS are recorded on an ordinal scale from 1–5, thus it is the peaks in this joyplot that highlight the overlap, or lack of overlap, between the four groups. H-values and p-values represent the test statistic and significance of each Kruskal-Wallis test.
	Fig 5. Activity and shelter use of lionfish, lobsters and Diadema.The proportion of time that lionfish, lobsters and Diadema spent active (a,b,c) and inside shelter (d,e,f) in the ‘alone’ and ‘together’ treatments during the 23-hour trial. Each plot represents how the behaviour of the focal species (indicated by the creature image) varies between the ‘alone’ and ‘together’ trials. For the lionfish graphs (a and d), the ‘alone’ bar represents the behaviour of lionfish when alone, the ‘with lobster’ bar represents the behaviour of lionfish in the presence of a lobster, and the ‘with Diadema’ bar represents the behaviour of lionfish in the presence of a Diadema. For the lobster (b and e) and Diadema (c and f) graphs, the ‘alone’ bar represents their behaviour when alone, whilst the ‘with lionfish’ bar represents their behaviour in the presence of a lionfish. Violin plots represent the spread of the data and are scaled so that the violins on each plot have the same area. Each violin plot is overlaid with a boxplot showing the median and inter-quartile range. All treatments have n = 12, except the ‘lionfish-Diadema together’ treatment, for which n = 7.

References [+] :

Alvarez-Filip, Flattening of Caribbean coral reefs: region-wide declines in architectural complexity. 2009, Pubmed, Echinobase