Promoting resilience is highly relevant to preserving biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. For coral reefs, parrotfish protection emerged as a mainstream action for reversing the degradation experienced by these systems. The rationale is that restoring their populations will increase grazing activity and reinforce control of fast‐growing macroalgae, facilitating coral cover recovery. A lack of a link between parrotfish trends and macroalgae and coral cover trends at a large scale has, however, often been the case. Suggesting more complex underlying dynamics that should be reexamined. In this review, we discuss how lumping parrotfish species as if they were functionally redundant may obscure trends. And how a lack of appreciation of other functions around the parrotfish paradigm, specifically bioerosion, may have unforeseen and potentially adverse effects on degraded reefs. We show that bioerosion responded more directly and quickly to spatial and temporal changes in parrotfish assemblages than macroalgae consumption, arguably due to the varying vulnerability among Caribbean parrotfishes to fisheries and habitat loss. For highly degraded reefs, positive changes in parrotfish populations could hence compromise the remaining coral skeleton structures and the reef framework, further accentuating reef degradation, where increases in macroalgae consumption could not necessarily compensate for higher rates of bioerosion.

中文翻译：

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将鹦嘴鱼生物侵蚀纳入珊瑚礁恢复力的食草范式


提高复原力与保护生物多样性和生态系统功能高度相关。对于珊瑚礁来说，保护鹦嘴鱼成为扭转这些系统所经历的退化的主流行动。其基本原理是，恢复它们的数量将增加放牧活动并加强对快速生长的大型藻类的控制，从而促进珊瑚覆盖的恢复。然而，鹦嘴鱼趋势与大规模藻类和珊瑚覆盖趋势之间缺乏联系，这种情况经常出现。提出了更复杂的潜在动态，应该重新审视。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了将鹦嘴鱼物种归为一类，就好像它们在功能上是多余的一样，可能会掩盖趋势。以及缺乏对鹦嘴鱼范式的其他功能的认识，特别是生物侵蚀，如何对退化的珊瑚礁产生不可预见和潜在的不利影响。我们表明，与大型藻类消费相比，生物侵蚀对鹦嘴鱼组合的空间和时间变化的反应更直接、更迅速，这可能是由于加勒比鹦嘴鱼对渔业和栖息地丧失的脆弱性不同。因此，对于高度退化的珊瑚礁，鹦嘴鱼种群的积极变化可能会损害剩余的珊瑚骨架结构和珊瑚礁框架，进一步加剧珊瑚礁退化，其中大型藻类消费量的增加不一定能补偿较高的生物侵蚀率。