Nonsynchronous recovery of community characteristics in island spiders after a catastrophic hurricane

Abstract

We monitored spiders on 41 Bahamian islands for 4 years before and then 4 years after the catastrophic Hurricane Floyd passed directly over the site, inundating the study islands with its storm surge. The respective recoveries of major community properties after this annihilation were far from synchronous. Before the hurricane, the species-area relation was generally strong and the slope showed no temporal trend. After the hurricane, the slope increased from near zero (7 months later) to a value about equal to its prehurricane state. The lizard effect (difference in spider abundance or species richness between islands with and without the lizard Anolis sagrei) was generally strong before the hurricane; 7 months after, the lizard effect on abundance was weak and the effect on richness had vanished. In subsequent years, the lizard effect on abundance became strong again, but the effect on species richness remained weak. The strength of the lizard effect on both abundance and richness over the 8 years was strongly positively related to the density of lizards measured on a subset of the study islands. Twelve months after the hurricane, species richness averaged over all islands rebounded to the last prehurricane value, but abundance attained only about half that value; this finding was remarkably similar to results found in an earlier study of spiders impacted by Hurricane Lili (1996) in a different Bahamian region. Nonetheless, in the next 3 years, species richness failed to increase further, part of its long-term decline at the study site.

Predators, prey, and transient states in the assembly of spatially structured communities

“…The observation that this pattern was diminished by the end of the experiment supports the notion that drying is important in re-setting predator-prey dynamics in these habitats (Chase and Knight 2003). We suspect that many systems, including agricultural landscapes (Kruess and Tscharntke 1994), phytotelmata communities (Pimm and Kitching 1987), and small islands (Schoener and Spiller 2006) may be characterized by periodic loss and re-establishment of predator-prey interactions, and also by dynamic spatial gradients in resource availability and predation pressure.…”

Richness and composition of spiders in urban green spaces in Toledo, Ohio

“…Spider communities have been well examined in forest ecosystems (Miyashita et al 1998;Dias et al 2006), in agricultural settings (Riechert & Bishop 1990;Landis et al 2000;McIntyre 2000;Ö berg 2007) and on islands (e.g., Schoener & Spiller 2006), and it is evident that both natural and human disturbances strongly affect spider abundance and richness. Spiders are also affected by changes in habitat structure including changes to plant richness, architecture, and plant density (Wise 1993).…”

Making a virtue out of a necessity: Hurricanes and the resilience of community organization

“…To me, an intriguing result reported by Schoener and Spiller but not emphasized by them is found in table 1 in ref. 5: the z value was greatly depressed after the hurricane, and then quickly rebounded, for islands free of lizard predation. By contrast, on islands that retained their lizards after the hurricane, the z values stayed comparable to their prehurricane values and showed no clear trend thereafter.…”

“…Earlier correlative and experimental studies (see references in ref. 5) found that lizards on these small islands act as effective top predators, limiting spider abundance and species richness. The spider communities on these islands also match a pervasive pattern in community ecology, the species-area relationship, which describes how species richness increases with increasing island area (6,7).…”