Study of Corellation between Coral Reef Cover and Abundance of Reef Fish in Poncan Gadang Island Sibolga City

Abstract

Poncan Gadang Island used by people for marine tourism, underwater and fisheries activities. These activities make the island’s area as a ship transportation route and feared the condition of the coral reef ecosystem will be damaged. This research aims to find out the condition of coral reef (life coral), the abundance of reef fish and the corellation between those two variables in Poncan Gadang Island. This research was conducted in June 2018 using Underwater Photo Transect (UPT) and Underwater Visual Cencus (UVC) methods. From the results of this research were found 14 species of reef fish that consists of 5 families and 161 individual fish with 23.96 % coral reef lifeform percentage (damaged category). The corellation between coral reef lifeform and abundance of reef fish is 29.5%, which means showing sufficient or moderate corellation.