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.专性栖息于特定生境的鱼类往往会结成社会群体。目前我们仍尚不明确其栖息生境的特征是否会影响其社会决策行为。据此，我们以专性栖息于鹿角珊瑚科（Acroporidae）珊瑚的栖居珊瑚虾虎鱼为实验材料，开展了原位操控实验。我们将栖居珊瑚虾虎鱼转移至具备不同特征的新珊瑚宿主中，以此探究生境因素是否会对其社会决策产生影响。为验证社会行为学的两大核心理论——生态约束理论与恋巢收益理论，我们对实验对象的生境特征（即生境健康程度、尺寸与饱和度）进行了操控调整。这两类理论已在陆地类群中得到广泛验证，但在海洋类群中的相关研究仍较为匮乏。本数据集仓库包含本次实验的R代码与数据集CSV文件。