Abstract

Much is now known about the coral communities of the Cayman Islands; however few studies have been carried out on reef fish assemblages. Though there are no commercial fisheries to-date in the archipelago, however recreational fishing pressure has increased considerably with the growing population over the past decade. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) were established in 1986, with the main objectives of protecting coral reefs and their associated organisms (including fish communities), restoring fish stocks, and replenishment of fish to surrounding areas. In this study, important fish species of reef health status and species most commonly targeted by fishers have been compared between protected areas and non-protected fished areas. A fish census was carried out by Underwater Visual Census (UVC) around Grand Cayman during the months of January through to April 2009. For 53 target species, biomass, size and density were investigated for comparison between MPA and non-MPA. In addition, the occurrence of “rare species” (abundance < 1% of the total number of fish), the relationship between the different trophic groups were explored. Furthermore, the exportation of individuals by spillover effects were measured over a 5 km distance from each boundary using linear regression of the mean biomass per site. Reserve effect, evaluated for the first time in Grand Cayman after 23 years of MPAs, was significant (p < 0.01). However, spillover effect was only evident on the north boundary of the MPA (R = 0.9158, p < 0.01), no spillover effect was apparent on the south boundary.

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