Detailed Food Web Networks of Three Greater Antillean Coral Reef Systems : The Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica

Abstract EN

Food webs represent one of the most complex aspects of community biotic interactions.

Complex food webs are represented as networks of interspecific interactions, where nodes represent species or groups of species, and links are predator-prey interactions.

This paper presents reconstructions of coral reef food webs in three Greater Antillean regions of the Caribbean: the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica.

Though not taxonomically comprehensive, each food web nevertheless comprises producers and consumers, single-celled and multicellular organisms, and species foraging on reefs and adjacent seagrass beds.

Species are grouped into trophic guilds if their prey and predator links are indistinguishable.

The data list guilds, taxonomic composition, prey guilds/species, and predators.

Primary producer and invertebrate richness are regionally uniform, but vertebrate richness varies on the basis of more detailed occurrence data.

Each region comprises 169 primary producers, 513 protistan and invertebrate consumer species, and 159, 178, and 170 vertebrate species in the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica, respectively.

Caribbean coral reefs are among the world's most endangered by anthropogenic activities.

The datasets presented here will facilitate comparisons of historical and regional variation, the assessment of impacts of species loss and invasion, and the application of food webs to ecosystem analyses.