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RESULTS
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Result 1 : Total fish abundance is not significantly affected by coral reef complexity
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To test the effect of coral complexity on total fish abundance, we first ran a Kendall’s rank correlation test. Even though there seems to be a positive correlation between these two variables (Τ = 0.199), this result is not statistically significant (z = 1.322, p = 0.186). We did not find a significant effect of coral complexity in predicting fish abundance either (Generalized Linear Mixed Effect Model (GLMER) using the negative binomial family: χ² = 3.305, df = 1, p = 0.0691).
Despite total abundance of fish turned out not to be significantly affected by coral complexity, we observe a tendency for higher abundances of fish with a more complex reef (Fig. 1).
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Result 2 : Number of fish families is not significantly affected by coral reef complexity
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After running the Kendall’s rank correlation test, the number of fish families appears to be positively correlated with coral reef complexity (Τ = 0.199), but this result is not statistically significant (z = 0.142, p = 0.887). As for total fish abundance, the number of fish families did not change significantly with coral complexity (Generalize Linear Model (GLM): χ² = 0.0246, df = 1, p = 0.874) although we observe a slight trend for more fish families with a more complex coral reef (Fig. 2).
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Result 3 : Relationship between single fish families and coral reef complexity
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As previous results revealed no significant effect of coral reef complexity on total fish abundance and number of fish families, we further investigated trends in individual fish families. In this way we were able to answer the question whether fish abundance of a given family is significantly affected by coral reef complexity.
The results from the single analyses, obtained by either fitting a GLMER or GLM model, can be seen in Table 1. Despite not considering these results as being statistically relevant because of the small sample size, in general we can observe that the abundance of individuals within a single fish family follows a positive trend (i.e., as coral complexity increases, so does the number of individuals). This is not true for angelfish, where the trend is negative (i.e., as coral complexity increases, the number of individuals decreases). Only for surgeonfish, coral reef complexity turned out to be statistically significant in predicting fish abundance, however as mentioned above, this remains a fragile reuslt (Table 1, Fig. 3).
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Result 4 : Effect of depth on fish abundance and family diversity
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Regarding the depth of the water column, we did not run a statistical analysis, as explained in the method section, but we visualized the effect of this variable on total fish abundance and family diversity (Fig. 4).
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