Fish biodiversity of Courtown Cays, seaflower biosphere reserve (Colombian Caribbean): new records and an annotated checklist

Methods Study area and data collection The Seaflower Biosphere Reserve (SFBR), created in 2000, is a protected marine area of great importance for the conservation of the natural and cultural heritage of the Archipelago of San Andres, Providencia, and Santa Catalina, covering approximately 180,000 km2. Twenty-seven of the species observed (12%) have been assigned with some threat category by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and/or the regional assessment included in the Red Book of Marine Fishes of Colombia (Chasqui et al., 2017), and 43 (20%) species were new records for this location. [...]despite their diversity and abundance, these fishes are poorly studied, overlooked and an underestimated component due to their small size, difficult identification, and cryptic habits (Herler et al., 2011). Since the information about the geographic coverage of cryptobenthic fishes is poor, this emphasizes the remarkable reservoir of biodiversity that is yet to be discovered (Brandl et al., 2018). The high number of new records calls upon the need to continue the exploration and monitoring on remote localities and join research efforts to expand knowledge about the ecology, systematics, and conservation of understudied groups.