From archipelago to loko iʻa: Understanding cryptofauna communities, crabbing, and place-based management
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2020
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Abstract
Biological communities are structured by environmental drivers across different spatial and temporal scales. Coral reefs are highly productive and host the highest numbers of species in the ocean. Coral reefs are also known to exist across both latitude and depth as they have found throughout subtropical to tropical regions of the world and exist as deep as 150 m. In the Hawaiian Archipelago, coral reefs support ~7000 unqiue species. However, the bulk of species diversity reside as cryptofauna. Brachyuran crabs are ubiquitous cyrptofaunal members of coral reef communities and fill many trophic niches. Using autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS) across a depth gradient (12, 30, 60, 90 m), I found unique crab assemblages observed at each depth across 69 morphologically assigned species. ARMS were again utitlized to assess reef crab assemblages across the geographic extent of the Hawaiian Archipelago. Despite some interisland differences in communities, communities are ultimately different at a regional scale (MHI vs NWHI); however, these regional differences are not significant when compared with communities across the depth gradient. The important finding is that a shallow water latitudinal stretch of about 2,414 km with various environmental gradients (i.e. temperature, nutrients, coral cover) is not as strong as depth in structuring communities.In addition to being important for coral reefs, brachyuran crabs are important to people as a source of subsistence for coastal communities. Native Hawaiian Indigenous practices are known to effectively manage natural resources and are of particular interest as current inhabitants seek to manage and harvest food sustainably with modern management challenges (i.e., nutrient enrichment from upland agricultural waste, the spread of invasive species). Historic Indigenous harvest practices and a mark-recapture study were coupled to examine how Indigenous practices effectively maintain sustainable harvest of an introduced, but economically important, crab species (mud crab, Scylla serrata). Together with fishpond managers and fishery statisticians, we co-developed a versatile crab population model that can be tailored to changing manager objectives through time. In addition to showing current strategies are sustainable, we found that continuing these management strategies would allow for future sustainable harvest. Overall, this work shows that spatial scales are important for structuring biological communities and are necessary to define for determining management strategies.
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Zoology, crabbing, cryptofauna, Hawaiʻi, loko iʻa, marine biodiversity, mesophotic coral ecosystems
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129 pages
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