Highly Structured Fish Communities in Australian Desert Springs

Abstract

T? assess the pattern and causes of community structure, we sampled 38 tsolated spnngs m the Dalhousie Basin of South Australia to determine the distributions of five taxa of.native fishes. We visited each spring on at least two consecutive days, used several c?llectmg methods to determine the presence or absence of each taxon, and took stand~rdtzed m~asurements of abiotic environmental variables. Community organization was htgh~y predtctable: ~l) number of species increased with spring size, (2) each species occurred m nearly all spnngs larger than a certain size, and (3) species composition exhibited n_e~rly perfect nestednes~ .. These results suggest that much of the variation in the compo-sttH:~n of other commumttes may not be stochastic. When the influence of historical and envt:onm~ntalfactors can_ be assessed, .the colonization-extinction processes and ecological relat10nsh1ps that determme commumty structure may be highly deterministic.

Natural and Human Influences on Fish Species Richness in Small North Temperate Lakes: Implications for Bioassessment

“…Species-area relations (MacArthur and Wilson 2001) are often demonstrated in ecological studies (Matthews and Robison 1998, Pfister 1998, Kodric-Brown and Brown 1993. These relations were also evident within our data set but were not as important as colonization-extirpation variables when all were included in the model.…”

Spatial pattern of a fish assemblage in a seasonal tropical wetland: effects of habitat, herbaceous plant biomass, water depth, and distance from species sources

“…The influence of depth on the composition of species in a fish assemblage was also observed in streams (Power, 1984;Mendonça et al, 2005;Ferreira & Casatti, 2006), in temporary environments (Kodric-Brown and Brown 1993;Baber et al, 2002;Pazin et al, 2006), in floodplain lakes (Rodriguez & Lewis, 1997;Tejerina-Garro et al, 1998) and in secondary channels that join the lakes to the main river beds (Hoeinghaus et al, 2003).…”

Spatial distribution of fish assemblages along environmental gradients in the temporary ponds of Northern Pantanal, Brazil

“…Therefore, the absence of a spatial pattern in fish species composition suggests that local deterministic processes have created a meso-scale random distribution. In these water bodies, much of the composition can be determined by colonisation so that, although the colonisation process may be random, the species pool can be deterministic and predictable (Kodrick-Brown and Brown, 1993).…”