Mass coral bleaching events displace and stress hundreds of reef fish species, creating welfare impacts at reef ecosystem scale that are poorly monitored.
Reef fish displaced from bleached or dead coral experience acute habitat loss stress, increased predation exposure and disrupted social hierarchies. Species with high site fidelity — clownfish, damselfish, wrasse — face particular stress when host corals die. Food web collapse following bleaching causes starvation stress across multiple trophic levels. The welfare impacts of bleaching events are distributed across millions of individual fish across vast reef systems.