Abstract
Linking local communities to a metacommunity can positively affect diversity by enabling immigration of dispersal-limited species and maintenance of sink populations. However, connectivity can also negatively affect diversity by allowing the spread of strong competitors or predators. In a microcosm experiment with five ciliate species as prey and a copepod as an efficient generalist predator, we analysed the effect of connectivity on prey species richness in metacommunities that were either unconnected, connected for the prey, or connected for both prey and predator. Presence and absence of predator dispersal was cross-classified with low and high connectivity. The effect of connectivity on local and regional richness strongly depended on whether corridors were open for the predator. Local richness was initially positively affected by connectivity through rescue of species from stochastic extinctions. With predator dispersal, however, this positive effect soon turned negative as the predator spread over the metacommunity. Regional richness was unaffected by connectivity when local communities were connected only for the prey, while predator dispersal resulted in a pronounced decrease of regional richness. The level of connectivity influenced the speed of richness decline, with regional species extinctions being delayed for one week in weakly connected metacommunities. While connectivity enabled rescue of prey species from stochastic extinctions, deterministic extinctions due to predation were not overcome through reimmigration from predator-free refuges. Prey reimmigrating into these sink habitats appeared to be directly converted into increased predator abundance. Connectivity thus had a positive effect on the predator, even when the predator was not dispersing itself. Our study illustrates that dispersal of a species with strong negative effects on other community members shapes the dispersal-diversity relationship. When connections enable the spread of a generalist predator, positive effects of connectivity on prey species richness are outweighed by regional extinctions through predation.
Highlights
Traditional community ecology has focused on local scale mechanisms when trying to explain patterns of species’ distributions and abundances
Local species richness was lowest in the unconnected control, while the negative effect of predator dispersal became apparent on day 21 and day 28, respectively
Regional richness had been reduced to three species in the treatment with high predator dispersal, while all five species still were present in the metacommunities with low predator dispersal
Summary
Traditional community ecology has focused on local scale mechanisms when trying to explain patterns of species’ distributions and abundances. Connectedness of a set of local communities to a metacommunity can have both positive and negative effects on diversity, depending on the level of connectivity and the spatial scale at which diversity is considered. Connectivity allows immigration of dispersal-limited species and reimmigration of inferior competitors from source communities, increasing local diversity [3,4,5]. A high degree of connectivity, is predicted to result in homogenization of the metacommunity and create one single large community. While empirical studies confirm the positive effect of dispersal on local diversity, experiments do not necessarily find a decline of local and regional diversity with high connectivity [5]
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