Zeroes do matter: the tale of the missing fishes in Cabilao Island Bohol, Philippine
Journal Title: Aquaculture, Aquarium, Conservation & Legislation - International Journal of the Bioflux Society - Year 2011, Vol 4, Issue 5
Abstract
Data from plankton surveys typically contain many zeroes. Pomacentrid larvae collected from the reef of Cabilao Island, Bohol, Philippines was typical of such data wherein 294 out of 354 tows had 0 larval counts. This data is traditionally analyzed using the Poisson distribution in linear model. However, the Poisson model predicted far less zeroes and more missing pomacentrids than what is observed. To account for this kind of data, this paper examined other statistical distributions that can account for the extra zeroes and the missing fishes; these are negative binomial, zero-inflated poisson, zero-inflated negative binomial, zero-altered poisson and zero-altered negative binomial. We fitted these distributions and Poisson with location and moon phase as covariates to identify which of the model is suited for the data. The best model was selected based on having the lowest Akaike`s Information Criteria (AIC) score. The AIC result showed that the zero-altered negative binomial distribution (ZANB) with moon phase as covariate was suitable for the current data. The ZANB model showed that zeroes contribute a significant effect on abundance estimate; higher number of zeroes accounted for the significantly lower fishes observed in the first quarter than in the last quarter but not on the other moon phases. Excluding the zeroes, this difference is not statistically significant. Moreover, the ZANB model also was able to predict the actual number of zero and non-zero fishes better than the Poisson model, thus the tale of the missing fishes is explained by the inappropriateness of Poisson to fit data with many zeroes.
Authors and Affiliations
Erwin Brunio, Joeppette Hermosilla, Filipina Sotto, Eiji Tanaka
Keywords
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