Parrotfish bite annotations from Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, 2009-2013 (NCEI Accession 0277420)

This dataset contains biological and physical data collected at Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary during deployment Burkepile_FL_Keys in the Caribbean Sea from 2009-06-22 to 2013-08-17. These data include taxon and water temperature. The instruments used to collect these data include Camera. These data were collected by Deron Burkepile and Rebecca Vega Thurber of Florida International University as part of the "Cascading interactions of herbivore loss and nutrient enrichment on coral reef macroalgae, corals, and microbial dynamics (HERBVRE)" project. The Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) submitted these data to NCEI on 2023-01-23.

The following is the text of the dataset description provided by BCO-DMO:

Parrotfish bite annotations

Dataset Description:
This dataset contains parrotfish bite observations for the study plots at Pickles Reef, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary from 2009-2013. Published in Nature Communications (2016) https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11833, Supplementary Data 2c.

Natural history of the study site:
This experiment was conducted in the area of Pickles Reef (24.99430, -80.40650), located east of Key Largo, Florida in the United States. The Florida Keys reef tract consists of a large bank reef system located approximately 8 km offshore of the Florida Keys, USA, and paralleling the island chain. Our study reef is a 5-6 m deep spur and groove reef system within this reef tract. The reefs of the Florida Keys have robust herbivorous fish populations and are relatively oligotrophic. Coral cover on most reefs in the Florida Keys, including our site, is 5-10%, while macroalgal cover averages ~15%, but ranges from 0-70% depending on location and season. Parrotfishes ( Scaridae ) and surgeonfishes ( Acanthuridae ) are the dominant herbivores on these reefs as fishing for them was banned in 1981. The other important herbivore on Caribbean reefs, the urchin Diadema antillarum , remains at low densities across the Florida Keys following the mass mortality event in 1982-3.

Related Reference:
Zaneveld, J.R., D.E. Burkepile, A.A. Shantz, C. Pritchard, R. McMinds, J. Payet, R. Welsh, A.M.S. Correa, N.P. Lemoine, S. Rosales, C.E. Fuchs, and R. Vega Thurber (2016) Overfishing, nutrient pollution, and temperature interact to disrupt coral reefs down to microbial scales. Nature Communications 7:11833 https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms11833 Supplementary Information