Both recruitment and evasion of predators by settled fish are facilitated by availability of shelter. Chesson (1998) argued that recruitment limitation and post-recruitment interactions "should not be regarded as alternatives but as jointly acting." In tropical shelves predation pressure is high, forcing potential prey to develop morphological and behavioral traits that allow integral utilization of refuge resources; these traits include cryptic habits and territoriality. Many fishes that exploit small coral patches are cryptic species of the families Labrisomidae, Gobiidae, etc.; others are territorial species (e.g., Pomacentridae). Cryptic fishes can account for 50% of the richness in temperate reefs. Coral patches in reef lagoons are oasis-like shelters, relatively isolated from one another and from the reef barrier by stretches of sand or seagrass beds. The objective of this note is to test for differences in fish diversity among small coral patches in a Caribbean reef lagoon, as a function of patch size, distance to the reef barrier, complexity and coral species number. The hypothesis is that diversity will be higher in patches closer to the reef, larger, more complex and richer in coral species. Inglés

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