Translocation of Coral-Dwelling Gobies and Habitat Factors - Papua New Guinea - 2018-2019

Habitat-specialist fishes often organize in social groups. We have yet to understand whether characteristics of their habitat influence their social decisions. Accordingly, we completed a manipulative in situ experiment using a coral-dwelling goby, which exclusively resides in acroporid corals. We translocated coral-dwelling gobies to new corals with different characteristics to determine whether habitat factors affect their social decisions. We altered habitat characteristics (i.e., habitat health, size and saturation) in order to test two key theories of sociality: ecological constraints, benefits-of-philopatry. Both theories have been extensively tested in terrestrial taxa, but only minimally in marine taxa.The data repository includes the R code and csv file with the dataset for the experiments.