Settlement rates of fishes and crab megalopa within Artificial Seagrass Units (ASU) in Back Sound, NC from June to August 2018

To parse the ecological effects of habitat area and patchiness on faunal community structure and dynamics of estuarine nekton, we employed artificial seagrass unit (ASU) landscapes at a scale relevant to habitat fidelity of common fish and macroinvertebrates in our temperate study system, Back Sound, NC. These ASU landscapes were designed along orthogonal axes of artificial seagrass area (i.e., percent cover of each landscape = 10-60 percent) and fragmentation per se (i.e., percolation probability; 0.1-0.59) to delineate their independent and interactive effects on seagrass fish and macroinvertebrate communities.

To assess whether faunal density patterns across landscapes were driven by larval settlement, larval fishes and crab megalopa were sampled seven times from June to August 2018 using Standardized Monitoring Units for the Recruitment of Fishes (SMURFs). To examine how settlement rates across landscapes differed depending upon the amount of immediately surrounding artificial seagrass, each SMURF was positioned at the 'center' of the largest ASU patch (as estimated for each irregular shape) in each landscape.

SMURF samples were collected by Drs. F. Joel Fodrie and Amy H. Yarnall for the Estuarine Ecology Laboratory of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences. SMURF samples were processed by Lauren A. Yeager at the Marine Science Institute, of the University of Texas at Austin.