| Description: |
Ecological drivers of fitness components such as the lifetime reproductive success (LRS) determine whether a population will be susceptible to change in its habitat. To date, only few studies quantified the LRS across multiple generations in marine species, and examples from the wild are missing. As a result of a long term sampling effort, such information is available for the wild orange clownfish, Amphiprion percula, population from Kimbe Island (PNG). There, little evolutionary adaptive potential was found and the LRS for the self-recruiting portion of the population is mainly driven by the habitat of the breeder. However, within the habitat variable, which of the host anemone species, the geographic location, the density and the depth contributes to LRS remains unknown because they were combined into a global habitat information. Here we tested whether it is the ecology or the spatial distribution of clownfish that has the potential to shape local components of fitness and self-recruitment, which are key parameters for the maintenance of this wild population. Our state of the art spatially explicit analysis disentangled the role of these factors. We found that the host anemone species had an impact on wild clownfish LRS independently from their spatial distribution. The spatial distribution nevertheless had an impact on its own, as reflected by the spatial autocorrelation of LRS. Depth and density of anemones did not show a significant impact. Our findings imply that this clownfish population is susceptible to human-induced or natural modifications of the proportion of the two host anemone species and their spatial distribution |