Dietary resilience of coral reef fishes to habitat degradation

The ability of consumers to adjust their diet in response to resource shifts is a key mechanism allowing the persistence of populations and the underlying species’ adaptive capacity. Yet on coral reefs, one of the marine habitats most vulnerable to global change, the extent to which species alter their diet remains poorly understood. Here, we integrated DNA-based gut content analyses (metabarcoding), otolith analysis, body condition, and field surveys to test how dietary versatility can mediate effects of habitat degradation on two invertivorous fishes: Chaetodon capistratus, a browser, and Hypoplectrus puella, an active predator. Metabarcoding revealed significant dietary variation in both species across reefs with different levels of coral cover. However, the response was more pronounced in the browser, whose diet was anthozoan-dominated on healthy reefs, whereas annelid-dominated on degraded reefs. We found slower growth and reduced body condition on degraded reefs in the browser but..., , , # Dietary resilience of coral reef fishes to habitat degradation

DOI: [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qz612jmpz](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qz612jmpz)

This deposit contains sequence-based diet data, otolith (age/growth) measurements, benthic cover data collected from nine reefs in Bocas del Toro, Panama, fish length-weight and body condition (Kn) used in the study “Dietary resilience of coral reef fishes to habitat degradation.”

Files included in this deposit

* `curated_BCS19_phyloseq.rds` — RDS file containing a phyloseq object assembled from Illumina COI sequences of fish stomach and gut contents for two study species: *Chaetodon capistratus* and *Hypoplectrus puella*.
* `bocas_diet_otoliths_all.csv` — CSV file with fish and otolith measurements used for growth/age analyses.
* `bocas_benthic_quadrat_data.csv` — CSV file of benthic cover scores from photographic quadrats scored with CoralNet.
* `Categories.txt` — Delimited text file mapping taxon acronyms to full taxon names and ..., , **Changes after Dec 19, 2025:** Minor edits to phyloseq object (curated_BCS19_phyloseq.rds): Fixed typo in sample metadata and standardized sample name formatting. Upload bocas_fish_condition.csv.