ABSTRACT
Coral reef fi shes have long been known to exhibit highly specialised patterns of habitat use (e.g., Fautin, 1985; Munday et al., 1997; Gardiner and Jones, 2005), but are generally considered to be highly versatile in their feeding (Ross, 1986; Bellwood et al., 2006c), opportunistically consuming a wide range of different prey. One striking example of this is the range of fi shes (including algal farming damselfi shes) that abandon their normal feeding habitats to take advantage of ephemeral, lipid-rich prey, feeding on corals eggs during annual mass-spawning by scleractinian corals (Pratchett et al., 2001; McCormick, 2003). There is however, increasing realisation that coral reef fi shes can be extremely specialised when it comes to diet. The broad trophic groups once used to categorise reef fi shes (e.g., planktivores, herbivores, carnivores and omnivores) are increasingly being sub-divided to capture important differences in ecosystem function (Graham et al., 2006; Hoey and Bellwood, 2011), while some studies simply recognise
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. E-mail: morgan.pratchett@jcu.edu.au
that individual species have unique and important functional roles (e.g., Bellwood et al., 2003, 2006b). Many species have extremely specialised diets or feeding habits, such as Holacanthus angelfi shes that feed almost exclusively on sponges, and mainly on just one species (Randall and Hartman, 1968) or tube-lip wrasses (Labroides and Labrichthys) that consume coral mucous from small wounds that they infl ict on specifi c coral types (Cole et al., 2008).
