The Community Concept in Marine Zoology, with Comments on Continua and Instability in Some Marine Communities: A Review

Abstract

The community concept has had a long, complex history in plant and animal ecology. Divergent views about the nature of communities have been most marked in plant ecology: the Zurich–Montpellier school regarded plant communities as largely abstract, based on a mosaic of vegetation, whereas the Uppsala school and other northern plant ecologists regarded communities as concrete, quantifiable units. The analogy between communities and organisms has been used often, particularly in American dynamic ecology, although the analogy can only be a loose one. Communities have also been regarded as abstractions from independent continuous distributions of the individual species. This idea has been used in recent gradient analysis of plant communities.Similar and equally variant ideas have been used in marine zoology. Many studies in marine ecology have been based on Möbius' concept of the biocoenosis, or on Petersen's use of dominant or conspicuous index species, with added theoretical notions which apparently originated in plant ecology. New evidence is presented that some marine benthic communities may be characterized in terms of dominants while also allowing analysis as parts of continua of distribution along gradients. In addition, although stability usually increases as communities evolve, some types are intrinsically unstable because of the activities of the organisms themselves, rather than because of changes in the physical environment alone.Because there are different kinds of marine "communities" a single rigorous definition seems impossible. A definition is proposed which avoids theoretical suppositions about community dynamics to allow the variety of phenomena in community relations to be investigated in a relatively unbiased way.