“…Therefore, understanding the causes of variation in recruitment rnay be crucial for predicting patterns in abundance of older benthic and demersal stages. A host of factors are known to generate variation in recruitment of reef fishes, including microhabitat (Sale et al 1984, Shulman 1984, Carr 1989, 1994, Levln 1993, Caselle & Warner 1996, Schmitt & Holbrook 1996, resident conspecifics (Sale 1976, Sweatman 1985, Behrents 1987, Booth 1992, Forrester 1995, Tupper & Boutilier 1995, Schmitt & Holbrook 1996, Steele 1997, potential interspecific competitors (Shulman et al 1983, Sweatman 1985, Jones 1987, Sweatman & St. John 1990, and predators (Doherty & Sale 1985, Beets 1997, Steele 1997. However, it is difficult to generalize about the importance of each of these processes for 2 important reasons: (1) past studies have used a variety of experimental methodolog~es, which precludes direct cornpansons among them; and (2) each process is often explored independently, precluding detection of interactions among processes and making it impossible to assess the relative importance of each process (Underwood & Petraitis 1994, Steele 1997.…”