Size structural change in lightly exploited coral reef fish communities: evidence for weak indirect effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exploitation influences community structure directly through preferential removal of larger-bodied fishes and indirectly because larger-bodied fishes may exert top-down control upon other community members. We consider the direct and indirect effects of subsistence exploitation upon the size structure of coral reef fish communities along an island-scale spatial gradient of fishing intensity. We explored the effect of fishing intensity and sample date (three dates over a year) at six islands and the overall effect of fishing intensity averaged over sample dates at 13 islands. Fishing intensity consistently explained more of the variation in the size metrics than sample date. In response to exploitation, the mean weight of individuals declined by 52%, the weighted average maximum size (L max ) declined by 25%, and slopes of community size spectra steepened. The larger size classes (>26 cm) declined in relative numbers by 63% and relative biomass by 61% in response to exploitation. However, the numbers and biomass of the three smallest size classes (<25 cm) increased by 31% and 9%, respectively, in response to exploitation. This increased abundance is consistent with a weak compensatory response presumably from a reduction in predation upon smaller size classes as an indirect effect of exploiting larger size classes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".