title: Spatial distribution of nominally herbivorous fishes across environmental gradients on Brazilian rocky reefs.
abstract: Assemblages of roving herbivores were consistently different between eastern, warmer, sheltered sites and western, colder, more wave-exposed sites. At eastern sites, detritivorous-herbivorous species dominated while omnivores had the highest biomass and were dominant at western sites. Macroalgivores did not show any trends related to location. These distributional patterns, at relatively small spatial scales of a few kilometres, mirror large-scale latitudinal patterns observed for the studied species along the entire Brazilian coast, where cold water associated species are abundant on south-eastern rocky reefs (analogous to the western sites of this study), and tropical species are dominant on north-eastern coral reefs (analogous to the eastern sites). Species-level analyses demonstrated that depth was an important factor correlated with biomasses of Diplodus argenteus, Sparisoma axillare and Sparisoma tuiupiranga, probably due to resource availability and interspecific competition. Herbivorous fish assemblages in the study area have been historically affected by fishing, and combined with the variation in assemblage structure, this is likely to have important, spatially variable effects on the dynamics of benthic communities.
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Ecologia e Conservação de Ambientes Recifais, Departamento de Biologia Marinha, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Caixa Postal 100644, CEP 24001-970, Niterói, RJ, Brazil.|Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), UMR "Entropie", Labex Corail, Université de Perpignan, Perpignan, 66000, France.
authors.forename: C A M M
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Cordeiro
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Ecologia e Conservação de Ambientes Recifais, Departamento de Biologia Marinha, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Caixa Postal 100644, CEP 24001-970, Niterói, RJ, Brazil.|Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), UMR "Entropie", Labex Corail, Université de Perpignan, Perpignan, 66000, France.
authors.forename: T C
authors.initials: TC
authors.lastname: Mendes
authors.affiliation: Marine Spatial Ecology Laboratory and Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, School of Biological Sciences, Goddard Building, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: A R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Harborne
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Ecologia e Conservação de Ambientes Recifais, Departamento de Biologia Marinha, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Caixa Postal 100644, CEP 24001-970, Niterói, RJ, Brazil.
authors.forename: C E L
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Ferreira
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D018533:Biomass; D001938:Brazil; D057894:Coral Reefs; D005399:Fishes; D060434:Herbivory
keywords: browser; scraper; south-western Atlantic; trophic guild; upwelling; wave exposure