Relationships between a common Caribbean corallivorous snail and protected area status, coral cover, and predator abundance

As coral populations decline across the Caribbean, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the forces that inhibit coral survivorship and recovery. Predation by corallivores, such as the short coral snail Coralliophila abbreviata,are one threat to the health of reefs worldwide, but understanding of the factors controlling corallivore populations, and therefore corallivore predation pressure, remains limited. To examine the extent to which bottom-up (i.e., coral prey) and top-down (i.e., predators) forces relate to C. abbreviata distributions, we surveyed C. abbreviata abundance, percent coral cover, and the abundance of potential snail predators across six protected and six unprotected reefs in the Florida Keys. We found that C. abbreviata abundance was lower in protected areas, which had more diverse predator assemblages, and that across all sites snail abundance generally increased with coral cover. C. abbreviata abundance had strong, negative relationships with two gastro...