Habitat selection determines abundance, richness and species composition of beetles in aquatic communities
- 5 July 2005
- journal article
- Published by The Royal Society in Biology Letters
- Vol. 1 (3), 370-374
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2005.0310
Abstract
Distribution and abundance patterns at the community and metacommunity scale can result from two distinct mechanisms. Random dispersal followed by non-random, site-specific mortality (species sorting) is the dominant paradigm in community ecology, while habitat selection provides an alternative, largely unexplored, mechanism with different demographic consequences. Rather than differential mortality, habitat selection involves redistribution of individuals among habitat patches based on perceived rather than realized fitness, with perceptions driven by past selection. In particular, habitat preferences based on species composition can create distinct patterns of positive and negative covariance among species, generating more complex linkages among communities than with random dispersal models. In our experiments, the mere presence of predatory fishes, in the absence of any mortality, reduced abundance and species richness of aquatic beetles by up to 80% in comparison with the results from fishless controls. Beetle species' shared habitat preferences generated distinct patterns of species richness, species composition and total abundance, matching large-scale field patterns previously ascribed to random dispersal and differential mortality. Our results indicate that landscape-level patterns of distribution and species diversity can be driven to a large extent by habitat selection behaviour, a critical, but largely overlooked, mechanism of community and metacommunity assembly.Keywords
This publication has 27 references indexed in Scilit:
- LARVAL PERFORMANCE AND OVIPOSITION SITE PREFERENCE ALONG A PREDATION GRADIENTEcology, 2004
- The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi‐scale community ecologyEcology Letters, 2004
- Toward an ecological synthesis: a case for habitat selectionOecologia, 2003
- The relative importance of lethal and non‐lethal effects of fish on insect colonisation of pondsFreshwater Biology, 2002
- Colonization under threat of predation: avoidance of fish by an aquatic beetle, Tropisternus lateralis (Coleoptera: Hydrophilidae)Oecologia, 2001
- Oviposition Site Choice and Life History EvolutionAmerican Zoologist, 1996
- Why Predation Rate Should Not be Proportional to Predator DensityEcology, 1993
- The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: The Robert H. MacArthur Award LectureEcology, 1992
- Detrended Correspondence Analysis of Dietary DataTransactions of the American Fisheries Society, 1988
- Diversity and abundance of aquatic insects reduced by introduction of the fish Clarias gariepinus to pools in Central AfricaBiological Conservation, 1972