Overlooked small and juvenile piscivores dominate shallow-water estuarine "refuges" in tropical Australia

Abstract

A model was developed to estimate the relative impacts of different functional groups of piscivores on the shallow-water estuarine nursery assemblage of tropical north-eastern Australia. Data on variability in the occurrence, number and type of fish in the diet of different piscivores was combined with estimates of the abundance of each group. The model predicts that previously overlooked small and occasional or ‘minor’ piscivores, such as sillaginids, ambassids, sparids and small juvenile carangids, inflict mortality on new recruits to shallow-water nursery habitats that is orders of magnitude greater than that imparted by more conspicuous larger piscivores. Because of their high abundance, a shift in the diet of minor piscivores to prey on new recruits results in a massive increase in the consumption of fish prey by the piscivore assemblage as a whole. Even if the evidence that minor piscivores switch to target new recruits was rejected, the model shows that the highly abundant minor piscivores must still exert a significant proportion of predation mortality experienced by recruiting fishes. As a broad functional group, minor piscivores occur in most aquatic systems around the globe and are likely to play an important but largely overlooked role as predators that shape communities through predation on critical early life stages of other fishes.