Healthy hard-bottom habitats are critical for early life stages of the Caribbean spiny lobster (Panulirus argus), a species for which sponge-dominated environments often serve as indicators of suitable nursery habitat. Understanding how species composition influences the abundance of juvenile lobsters is critical for evaluating habitat suitability. This study used environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding to examine relationships between community complexity and juvenile lobster abundance across 12 sites using two loci (COI and 16S). Following standard QC, both total amplicon sequence variant (ASV) richness and Porifera-specific richness were compared to juvenile lobster abundance estimates from visual surveys.  Results indicate that eDNA-based estimates of community diversity, both total diversity and sponge-diversity, as indicated by ASV counts, did not predict lobster abundance. While it is possible that ASV diversity truly is not correlated with lobster abundance, we speculate that the presence of artificial lobster structures (ie., cinder blocks) or sampling conditions (e.g., tidal cycle resulting in high flow conditions, surface sampling of water) may have an impact on our results and that future efforts to explore these relationships are warranted.