Abstract
The generally positive relationship between the number of sites a species occupies and its average abundance within those sites provides an important link between population processes occurring at different spatial scales. Although such abundance–occupancy relationships (AORs) have been documented across a very wide range of taxa and in many different environments, little is known of such patterns in Earth's largest ecosystem, the deep sea. Wood falls – derived from natural or anthropogenic inputs of wood into the oceans – constitute an important deep‐sea habitat, habouring their own unique communities ultimately entirely dependent on the wood for chemical energy. In this study we take advantage of the unique features of an experimental wood fall deployment to examine AORs for the first time in deep‐sea invertebrates. The study design combines advantages of both experimental (tractability, control of key environmental parameters) and observational (natural colonisation by taxonomically diverse communities) studies. We show that the interspecific AOR is strongly positive across the 48 species occurring over 32 wood fall communities. The precise form of the AOR is mediated by both species‐level life history (body size) and by the colonisation stage at which communities were harvested, but not by environmental energy (wood fall size). Temporal dynamics within species are also generally consistent with positive intraspecific AORs. This support for positive AORs in the deep sea is an important extension of a macroecological generality into a new environment offering considerable potential for further testing and developing mechanistic macroecological theories.
Highlights
Knowing where species occur, and in what numbers, is fundamental to many questions in ecology
Different forms and dynamics of Abundance-Occupancy Relationships (AORs) might be implied by different ecological mechanisms (e.g. Borregaard and Rahbek 2010), and simple considerations of regional-scale population dynamics have suggested that colonisation is key to AORs (Freckleton et al 2005, 2006)
This first demonstration of AORs in deep-sea invertebrates is an important extension into the largest habitat on Earth (Dawson 2012) of a macroecological generality concerning the scaling of populations from individual to multiple communities. It further demonstrates the utility of deep-sea wood-falls as experimental systems in macroecology, offering advantages of both control and tractability and of more observational studies (McClain et al 2016). These unique characteristics have enabled us to address a number of questions about the form, strength, and dynamics of AORs, including the role of resource availability, species life histories, and the temporal dynamics of the AOR both within and across species
Summary
In what numbers, is fundamental to many questions in ecology. Macroecologists have long known that these two key variables are not independent of each other: the number of sites a species occupies and the abundance it reaches within those sites (and, by extension, its total population size) are typically positively associated Such Abundance Occupancy Relationships (AORs) are among the most general patterns in ecology, observed both across assemblages of species (the interspecific AOR) and within individual species through time (the intraspecific AOR), in numerous taxonomic groups and diverse habitats (Gaston et al 2000, Blackburn et al 2006, Borregaard and Rahbek 2010). Borregaard and Rahbek 2010), and simple considerations of regional-scale population dynamics have suggested that colonisation (itself determined both by species-specific traits and the distribution of suitable habitat) is key to AORs (Freckleton et al 2005, 2006) This in turn predicts that AORs should vary systematically across groups of species differing in key traits as well as across contrasting environmental settings. At higher resource levels, species-abundance distributions may be more equitable {Passy:2016kt}, leading to less variance in abundance across the community and less power to detect AORs - most likely because when patches are both highly connected and high in resources most species can attain sufficiently high densities within patches to persist and can reach most available patches (Freckleton et al 2006)
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