Including sessile polychaetes, there was a highly significant difference in seagrass epifaunal communities between reference and aquaculture areas (PERMANOVA, F 1,24 = 4.23, p = 0.004) and also between regions (F 2,24 = 14.60, p < 0.001) with no interaction (F 2,24 = 1.68, p = 0.10; Fig 5A ).
There was a significant difference in sessile polychaete biomass among treatments (One-way ANOVA, p = 0.03), and post-hoc tests revealed a significant difference between the low-density aquaculture and natural treatments (Tukey’s post-hoc test, p = 0.03), a marginally significant difference between high-density aquaculture and natural (p = 0.08), and no difference between low- and high- density aquaculture (p = 0.89; Table 1 ; Fig 3B ).