The marine fish assemblage of the East Kleinemonde Estuary over 20 years: Declining abundance and nursery function?

Marine fishes in the intermittently open East Kleinemonde Estuary, South Africa, were sampled using seine nets over a twenty year period between 1994 and 2014. This dataset was analysed after 11 years (1994-2005), and represented one of the few medium-term studies of fish communities in an intermittently open estuary. A further nine years of sampling (2006-2014) allowed us to revisit the fish community and to gauge if 20 years of data provides more insight into long-term trends in the fish community. The overall species abundance follows a cyclical pattern with two to three years of low abundance and two to three years of high abundance. This pattern broke down in the last five years of the study, with a decline in species richness and consistently low catches of almost all marine species recorded. This may have been as a result of a reduction in the area of submerged macrophytes in the estuary, as well as an increase in the frequency of mouth opening and subsequent decrease in available water area.