Impact of life history stages on fish species interactions and spatio-temporal distribution

The establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) and the implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) are often hampered by limited spatial information of target species, such as their optimal distributional range and habitat suitability, which varies with life history stage. Neglecting these ontogenetic variations may lead to biased predictions in species distributions. In this study, Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDMs) were constructed using Bayesian ordination and regression analysis (Boral) to assess the effects of ontogenetic variation on species interactions identification and spatio-temporal distribution prediction of 10 major fish species in the central and southern Yellow Sea. Individuals of each species were classified either as juveniles or adults, depending on their length at maturity. Our results reveal that spatial distribution, species interactions, and habitat suitability vary with life history stage for each species. JSDMs incorporating partitions for life history stage performed better than those excluding them, as evidenced by lower RMSE and higher R2 values. Therefore, we suggest that classifying species by life history stage may infer inter-species interactions as well as address the effects of ontogenetic habitat shifts on species distributions. Through this study, we highlight the importance of the impact life history stage has on fish species interactions and their spatio-temporal distributions, which can be used to provide guidance for the construction of MPAs and the spatial management of fisheries resources.