Disturbance can be a natural driver of habitat fragmentation, altering the amount and configuration of habitat. Specifically, hurricanes represent a major form of disturbance for coastal ecosystems and may break up contiguous landscapes, increasing habitat patchiness and the amount of edge habitat. Habitat edges may function differently than habitat interiors, often supporting different microclimates, food resources, and/or predation risk. Therefore, increase in the edge:interior associated with habitat fragmentation may lead to shifts in community diversity and abundance. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey, a category four storm, made landfall in Texas and represented a major physical disturbance for seagrass beds along the Gulf Coast. Long-term monitoring of seagrass revealed severe, but patchy losses, in habitat which likely served to increase total edge habitat in this system. This study focuses on the impact of this habitat disturbance on seagrass communities within Redfish Bay, Texas and the use of edge versus interior habitat at various trophic levels. We chose eight sites that varied in their degree of physical disturbance. We sampled seagrass structure, infauna, and epifaunal communities using with 10-cm cores taken at the edge and within the interior of beds. Additionally, we used minnow traps to sample fishes along habitat edges and interiors.
Results/Conclusions
We found no significant difference in fish species richness or total abundance between edge and interior seagrass habitat. We hypothesize that these larger-bodied, highly mobile species have the ability to easily access both seagrass interior and edge habitat, therefore showing little specificity in habitat preference. Due to their movement ability, fishes may respond to habitat shifts at a larger landscape scale than measured in this study. Future analysis will focus on the diversity and abundance of epifaunal communities along the edge and interior habitat following this disturbance event. Smaller scale changes in habitat may have a stronger impact upon these lower trophic level, smaller-bodied species due to their decreased mobility.