PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 22: Fish Habitat Structure and Movement
Monday, August 8, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 514 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Variation in temperate rocky reef fish assemblages at multiple spatial scales across temperate Australia.

Gillanders, Bronwyn^*,1, Connell, Sean¹, ¹ Southern Seas Ecology Laboratories, Adelaide, SA, Australia

ABSTRACT- Inadequate knowledge of spatial patterns of variation in ecological systems can preclude appropriate tests of hypotheses about processes. Fish assemblages associated with temperate rocky reef were sampled at similar latitudes across southern Australia using a hierarchical sampling design encompassing four spatial scales: tens of meters (transects), kilometers to tens of kilometers (sites), hundreds of kilometers (locations) and thousands of kilometers (regions). Fish were sampled in habitats where algal canopies were present and where they were absent. Differences between habitats among regions, locations and sites were investigated at different levels of taxonomic resolution (e.g. species, genera, family, order) to determine how spatial scale and taxonomic resolution interact. Habitat interacted with all levels of spatial scale at all levels of taxonomic resolution suggesting that at some sites, locations or regions significant differences in fish assemblages were found between habitats, whereas at others no significant differences were found. Overall, as taxonomic resolution decreased (i.e. moving from species to order) between habitat variability for individual sites also decreased. Despite small-scale variation in fish assemblages, data show that consistent patterns emerge at larger spatial scales.

Key words: temperate reef, fish, spatial scale, kelp