Co-occurrence of demersal fishes in a tropical bay in southeastern Brazil: A null model analysis

Co-occurrence of demersal fishes was assessed in a tropical bay in southeastern Brazil along an environmental gradient (inner, middle, and outer zones), defined according to depth and salinity. The aim was to test whether fish species are distributed randomly and independently of one another in accordance with a null model. The unconstrained null hypothesis for occurrence of a given species by chance in relation to other species was accepted for each zone separately, and rejected for the bay as a whole, for the full year and for each season separately, except summer. Findings of the environmentally constrained null models, which predict species presence or absence as a function of environmental conditions, were not significant, suggesting that the environmental variables we chose are not key factors for these species and that biotic interactions between species are not strong when species–environment relationships are considered. The partition of available resources inside each zone and fish movements along the three zones during summer may have contributed to higher fish species co-occurrence. Habitat segregation in the bay during the remaining seasons could explain the pattern of reduced co-occurrence, indicating the presence of two fish assemblages associated with different environmental characteristics.