Abstract

The crisis in the world’s fisheries is well documented with many stocks being fully or overexploited. The consequences of these activities include a number of cascading effects such as alteration of trophic dynamics and simplification of complex communities. We examined seagrass communities, both macrophyte resources and mega-invertebrate abundance, across the central Bahamas in order to investigate the potential negative impacts the loss of Queen conch may have on ecosystems and broader services. All sites were classified as shallow, dense seagrass beds with Thalassia testudium and associated detritus the dominate resources. Shannon-Weiner mega-invertebrate diversity across a gradient of queen conch and total Strombid (S. gigas + S. costatus) densities revealed significant quadratic relationships with peaks of diversity at intermediate densities. Multivariate analyses indicated significant differences in mega-invertebrate functional groups between communities with low, moderate, and high conch densities. Conch densities may serve as useful indicators of relative diversity, complexity, health, and function of seagrass communities over a broad scale.

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