El Niño mass coral mortality: a test of resource limitation in a coral reef damselfish population.

The mass mortality of reef corals in the eastern Pacific as a result of the 1982-1983 El Niño oceanographic anomaly permitted the first large scale test of resource limitation for a coral reef fish. Population densities of territorial herbivorous damselfish did not respond to the massive regional increase in space available for the cultivation of algal food following the El Niño event. The proportion of juveniles in the population was low and new recruits were uncommon, indicating that recruitment rates rather than resource supply probably control the abundance of this coral reef damselfish.