Fish Community Analysis in Indian River Lagoon

Seagrasses are an important foundation species that facilitate interactions between organisms and provide a wealth of ecosystem services. In the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), seagrass meadows have experienced substantial die-offs with a concomitant loss of habitat for fishes and other taxa. However, the impacts of these losses on the fish community in the IRL are not well understood, in part because we lack a comprehensive inventory of resident and transient fishes that use seagrasses as habitat. We are currently sampling for seagrass-dependent fishes using passive habitat collectors as part of a broader effort to determine the multiple stressors that seagrasses face in the IRL. We propose to incorporate eDNA, a non-invasive tool that would complement our sampling and expand our results. We will also take advantage of recent advances in metabarcoding for detecting seahorses and pipefishes (family: Syngnathidae), seagrass-obligate taxa that are likely imperiled by recent historic losses of this foundation species. Altogether, using both passive collectors and eDNA will provide a holistic understanding of seagrass-dependent fish communities in the IRL. This project will increase the library of high-quality sequence reads available to researchers and generate preliminary data on the conservation status of Syngnathid fishes.