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

Hein, Andrew M.; Gillooly, James F.

doi:10.1890/10-1922.1

Cited by 40 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Mounting evidence suggests that species' dispersal patterns shape community and food web structure in many ecosystems [38][39][40][41][42] . For example, competing reef fish species in the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem appear to have different dispersal abilities, and this difference may explain the complex patterns of species coexistence observed across the Great Barrier Reef 40 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dispersal has also been implicated as a potential cause of geographic variation in the structure of species interactions within local communities (for example, seed dispersal networks on insular versus mainland habitats 41 ). On shorter timescales, it is possible to show experimentally that differences in colonization rates among local habitats cause differences in community structure across a landscape 38 . For example, invertebrate predators and prey colonize experimental pond habitats at different rates.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, invertebrate predators and prey colonize experimental pond habitats at different rates. This differential colonization generates a spatial gradient in the relative abundances of species occupying different positions in a food web 38 . Variation in colonization rates across a landscape can also create spatial variation in functional structures within local food webs and the rate at which these structures develop during community assembly 39,43 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Larval dispersal drives trophic structure across Pacific coral reefs

et al. 2014

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Top predators are a critical part of healthy ecosystems. Yet, these species are often absent from spatially isolated habitats leading to the pervasive view that fragmented ecological communities collapse from the top down. Here we study reef fish from coral reef communities across the Pacific Ocean. Our analysis shows that species richness of reef fish top predators is relatively stable across habitats that vary widely in spatial isolation and total species richness. In contrast, species richness of prey reef fish declines rapidly with increasing isolation. By consequence, species-poor communities from isolated islands have three times as many predator species per prey species as near-shore communities. We develop and test a colonization-extinction model to reveal how larval dispersal patterns shape this ocean-scale gradient in trophic structure.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Larval dispersal drives trophic structure across Pacific coral reefs

et al. 2014

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“…Habitat loss, for example, can maximize either stochastic influences on plant community assembly (i.e., different plant communities on different islands due to random dispersal) or deterministic ones by favoring the same subsets of species with traits for long-distance colonization (Arroyo-Rodríguez et al 2013;Harvey and MacDougall 2014). Habitat loss can also modify predation pressure by concentrating predators in smaller remnant areas, creating predation-free patches via dispersal limitation (Kruess and Tscharntke 1994;Hein and Gillooly 2011), or reducing predator diversity on smaller patches because of food limitation (Holt 1997;Gravel et al 2011). The end result of all of these potential changes to insect herbivores, both direct and indirect, is that the outcomes of anthropogenic change on insect-based food webs can be difficult to predict.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Harvey

MacDougall

2015

The American Naturalist

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Anthropogenic influences on resources and consumers can affect food web regulation, with impacts on trophic structure and ecosystem processes. Identifying how these impacts unfold is challenging because alterations to one or both resources and consumers can similarly transform community structure, especially for intermediate consumers. To date, empirical testing of perturbations on trophic regulation has been limited by the difficulty in separating the direct effect of perturbations on species composition and diversity versus those unfolding indirectly via altered feeding pathways. Moreover, disentangling the independent and interactive impacts of co-varying stressors that characterize human-altered systems has been an ongoing analytical challenge. We used a large-scale meta-community experiment in grasslands to test how resource inputs, stand perturbation, and spatial factors affect regulation of insect herbivores in tri-trophic grassland food webs. Using path-model comparisons, we observed significant simplification of food web regulation on insect herbivores, shifting from mixed predator-resource regulation in unaltered mainland areas, to strictly resource-based regulation with landscape perturbation and fragmentation. Most changes were attributed to homogenization of plant community caused by landscape fragmentation and the deterministic influence of eutrophication that reduced among-patch beta-diversity. This led to a simplified food web dominated by fewer, but more abundant herbivore taxa. Our work implies that anthropogenic perturbation relating to resources and spatial isolation can transform the regulation of food web diversity, structure and function. abstract: Anthropogenic influences on resources and consumers can affect food web regulation, with impacts on trophic structure and ecosystem processes. Identifying how these impacts unfold is challenging because alterations to one or both resources and consumers can similarly transform community structure, especially for intermediate consumers. To date, empirical testing of perturbations on trophic regulation has been limited by the difficulty in separating the direct effect of perturbations on species composition and diversity from those unfolding indirectly via altered feeding pathways. Moreover, disentangling the independent and interactive impacts of covarying stressors that characterize human-altered systems has been an ongoing analytical challenge. We used a large-scale metacommunity experiment in grasslands to test how resource inputs, stand perturbation, and spatial factors affect regulation of insect herbivores in tritrophic grassland food webs. Using path-model comparisons, we observed significant simplification of food web regulation on insect herbivores, shifting from mixed predator-resource regulation in unaltered mainland areas to strictly resource-based regulation with landscape perturbation and fragmentation. Most changes were attributed to homogenization of plant community caused by landscape fragmentation and the deterministic...

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“…On a basic level, deterministic factors could have lasting effects on community composition that outweigh those that initially occurred through dispersal limitation and chance (e.g. Hein & Gillooly, 2011; Li et al., 2016). In the future, we hope to continue monitoring the animal communities on our habitat islands to track the extent abundance inequalities among island diminish (or increase) with time, whether they are associated with increased species turnover over the long term (stochastic local extinction), and the extent to which local abundances and species diversity (or functional diversity; e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Manipulation of habitat isolation and area implicates deterministic factors and limited neutrality in community assembly

Ord

Emblen

Hagman

et al. 2017

Ecology and Evolution

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Theory predicts deterministic and stochastic factors will contribute to community assembly in different ways: Environmental filters should regulate those species that establish in a particular area resulting in the ecological requirements of species being the primary driver of species distributions, while chance and dispersal limitation should dictate the likelihood of species reaching certain areas with the ecology of species being largely neutral. These factors are specifically relevant for understanding how the area and isolation of different habitats or islands interact to affect community composition. Our review of the literature found few experimental studies have examined the interactive effect of habitat area and isolation on community assembly, and the results of those experiments have been mixed. We manipulated the area and isolation of rock “islands” created de novo in a grassland matrix to experimentally test how deterministic and stochastic factors shape colonizing animal communities. Over 64 weeks, the experiment revealed the primacy of deterministic factors in community assembly, with habitat islands of the same size exhibiting remarkable consistency in community composition and diversity, irrespective of isolation. Nevertheless, tangible differences still existed in abundance inequality among taxa: Large, near islands had consistently higher numbers of common taxa compared to all other island types. Dispersal limitation is often assumed to be negligible at small spatial scales, but our data shows this not to be the case. Furthermore, the dispersal limitation of a subset of species has potentially complex flow‐on effects for dictating the type of deterministic factors affecting other colonizing species.

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

Cited by 40 publications

References 21 publications

Larval dispersal drives trophic structure across Pacific coral reefs

Larval dispersal drives trophic structure across Pacific coral reefs

Spatially Heterogeneous Perturbations Homogenize the Regulation of Insect Herbivores

Manipulation of habitat isolation and area implicates deterministic factors and limited neutrality in community assembly

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