Herbivore cross‐scale redundancy supports response diversity and promotes coral reef resilience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Functional redundancy contributes to resilience if different species in the same functional group respond to disturbance in different ways (response diversity). If species in a functional group perform their functional role at different spatial scales (cross‐scale redundancy), they are expected to respond differently to scale‐specific disturbance. Consequently, variance in the spatial scales over which species perform their functional role may provide a proxy for resilience. Coral reefs are diverse systems that provide key ecosystem services and are subject to increasing anthropogenic disturbances. Algal grazing by herbivorous fish contributes to the maintenance of coral‐dominated reefs. To date, there has been little evaluation of the traits driving response diversity among herbivorous fish and how this relates to coral recovery following acute disturbances. Using body size as a proxy for the spatial scale at which fish function, we tested whether cross‐scale redundancy in herbivores was an effective indicator of response diversity and coral recovery on 21 reefs monitored through a climate‐induced disturbance that caused coral bleaching and widespread coral mortality. When herbivorous fish assemblages that operated over a broader range of spatial scales were present on reefs prior to disturbance, the reefs were more likely to recover to coral‐dominated states after the disturbance. After the temperature‐induced disturbance, the loss of small herbivores was compensated for through increases in large herbivores. This was indicative of high response diversity and drove the overall increase in herbivore biomass at recovering sites. These compensatory mechanisms were not found at sites where herbivores operated over a narrower range of spatial scales. Synthesis and applications . Cross‐scale redundancy provides managers with an indicator of coral reef resilience, although the contribution of cross‐scale redundancy to resilience will vary among sites. Maintaining high cross‐scale redundancy at a given site requires that no size classes of reef herbivores are disproportionately depleted by fishing. Balanced harvesting, where species are all fished in proportion to their potential production, would help achieve this.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".