Functional connectivity from a reef fish perspective: behavioral tactics for moving in a fragmented landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Functional connectivity, the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes movement, depends on how animals perceive costs and benefits associated with habitat features and integrate them into a movement path. There have been few studies on functional connectivity in marine organisms, despite its importance for the effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas. In this study, we asked how open sand and conspecific distribution affected functional connectivity of longfin damselfish (Stegastes diencaeus) on fringing reefs in Barbados. We translocated 102 individuals to sites varying in sand gap width and in configuration: Continuous (solid reef between release site and territory); Detour (sand along the direct path between release site and territory, but an alternative, continuous solid U-shaped reef path); and Patch (sand between release site and territory, but an alternative stepping stone path). We visually tracked and mapped every homing path. We found no evidence of a barrier to movement in the Continuous configuration, but sand was a partial barrier in Detour and Patch configurations. The probability of crossing the sand gap dropped below 50% when its width was > 1.85 m in Detour and > 3.90 m in Patch configuration. Damselfish avoiding large gaps took detours that approximated the route maximizing travel over reef, but they crossed more short sand gaps and fewer conspecific territories, suggesting avoidance of agonistic interactions. This study quantifies for the first time the size and steepness of a barrier to movement in a marine organism, and it provides evidence for effects of both landscape configuration and conspecific distribution on functional connectivity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".