Journal
MARINE ECOLOGY PROGRESS SERIES
Volume 472, Issue -, Pages 249-256Publisher
INTER-RESEARCH
DOI: 10.3354/meps09992
Keywords
Barcoding; Diet composition; Lionfish; Invasion biology; Predator-prey interactions; Stomach content analysis
Categories
Funding
- Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding
- Ontario Genomics Institute [2008-OGI-ICI-03]
- Genome Canada
- Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada
- NSERC
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
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Indo-Pacific lionfish Pterois spp. have recently invaded marine habitats throughout the western Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea. Their unusual hunting behaviour suggests that they could prey on most fish species within their gape size limits. However, few prey species have been identified so far due to the challenges of identifying partly digested prey. Moreover, it is not clear how well the identifiable diet reflects the unidentified portion. To address these issues, we DNA-barcoded unidentifiable fish items from the stomachs of 130 lionfish captured on Bahamian coral reefs. We identified 37 fish prey species, nearly half of which had not previously been recorded in this region. The total richness of lionfish prey fish recorded so far may represent up to similar to 54% of potential prey species on the study reefs. The relative importance of prey species in the visually identifiable diet portion, which was limited to 25% of prey items, differed from that in the 'unidentifiable' portion, which was largely resolved here with barcoding, weakening extra-polations from visual identification. The high diet resolution afforded by barcoding can increase our ability to predict the impacts of invasive predators on recipient communities.
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