13 - Intertidal Fish Communities

Abstract

The chapter concentrates on rocky shore communities and considers community structure in terms of its functional components. It describes how structure varies over a range of spatial and temporal scales, includes a brief discussion of the few known instances of species interactions within particular communities, and assesses their importance in structuring such communities. Intertidal fishes are generally considered to be those that live their postlarval lives in the intertidal zone and possess particular morphological, physiological, and behavioral adaptations that enable them to do so. The combined populations of such species can be considered to be the intertidal fish community. Fishes that use the intertidal zone as a habitat do so for greatly different lengths of time or proportions of their life history. At one extreme are the species that live there for almost all their lives; at the other are those that enter for only brief periods during high tide.