Effects of ecology on the sociality of coral dwelling gobies, genus Gobiodon

We developed a framework to assess how ecological factors affected the sociality of animals, and we used coral dwelling gobies (genus Gobiodon) to model this framework. We identifed four categories of sociality to compare: form of sociality, degree of sociality, social plasticity, and hierarchy maintenance. We tested global and local ecological factors from climatic disturbances to habitat size, and assessed how they affected the different categories of sociality. We combined the findings of each category to determine to outlook of social maintenance in the taxa when considering the ecological factors tested. For coral dwelling gobies, we found that there is a very poor outlook for their social maintenance with respect to climatic disturbances., We collected data at three locations: Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea, Lizard Island in Australia, and One Tree Island in Australia. All work was completed under scuba diving. We completed surveys at Lizard Island along transects in 2014, 2018, 2020, 2022 and at One Tree Island in 2022 to determine the relationship between coral size, coral species, goby group size, and goby species. While under scuba, we also temporarily caught gobies in Lizard Island (2014), Kimbe Bay (2018), and One Tree Island (2019) to measure their sizes compared to their habitat size and group size and then returned them immediately to their corals., , # Effects of ecology on the sociality of coral dwelling gobies, genus Gobiodon

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mcvdnck7m](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mcvdnck7m)

Brief summary of dataset contents:

-transect datasets from the different locations and the different years:

Each file has the transect ID, date, location, coordinates, species encountered, number of species encountered from gobies and corals, size of corals, extra notes. Each column has a different variable collected from each transect (as a row).

GobyTransects-GS-CS_AllData_transect_ID_goby_ID_checked_Marty_LI_2014_Dryadupload.csv

GobyTransects_LI2020_v5_GS_Dryadupload.csv

GobyTransects-LI2022_v3_round2_Dryadupload.csv

GobyTransects-OTI2022_v3_Dryadupload.csv

| VARIABLE | DEFINITION | UNIT |
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