Abstract
Investigation of communities in extreme environments with unique conditions has the potential to broaden or challenge existing theory as to how biological communities assemble and change through succession. Deep‐sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems have strong, parallel gradients of nutrients and environmental stress, and present unusual conditions in early succession, in that both nutrient availability and stressors are high. We analyzed the succession of the invertebrate community at 9°50′ N on the East Pacific Rise for 11 yr following an eruption in 2006 in order to test successional theories developed in other ecosystems. We focused on functional traits including body size, external protection, provision of habitat (foundation species), and trophic mode to understand how the unique nutritional and stress conditions influence community composition. In contrast to established theory, large, fast‐growing, structure‐forming organisms colonized rapidly at vents, while small, asexually reproducing organisms were not abundant until later in succession. Species in early succession had high external protection, as expected in the harsh thermal and chemical conditions after the eruption. Changes in traits related to feeding ecology and dispersal potential over succession agreed with expectations from other ecosystems. We also tracked functional diversity metrics over time to see how they compared to species diversity. While species diversity peaked at 8 yr post‐eruption, functional diversity was continuing to increase at 11 yr. Our results indicate that deep‐sea hydrothermal vents have distinct successional dynamics due to the high stress and high nutrient conditions in early succession. These findings highlight the importance of extending theory to new systems and considering function to allow comparison between ecosystems with different species and environmental conditions.
Highlights
Disturbance is a ubiquitous and important driver of biological patterns in most ecosystems
An understanding of the processes influencing the pattern of succession following disturbance has been the focus of a century of research (e.g., Clements 1916, Gleason 1926, Egler 1954, Connell and Slatyer 1977, McCook 1994) and is of growing practical importance with the recent unprecedented rate of anthropogenic habitat destruction and alteration (Sasaki et al 2015)
We examine a suite of traits and functional diversity metrics that have been observed to change over succession in other marine benthic systems (Bolam et al 2016, Greenfield et al 2016, Verıssimo et al 2017)
Summary
Disturbance is a ubiquitous and important driver of biological patterns in most ecosystems. While a primary goal has been to identify general patterns of succession (Clements 1916, Odum 1969), the complex interplay of biotic and abiotic factors makes such generality difficult. These factors include site condition (Berlow 1997), the type and supply of initial colonists (Egler 1954, Sutherland and Karlson 1977), niche preemption and modification by Manuscript received 28 August 2020; revised 2 February 2021; accepted 15 March 2021.
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