Biodiversity, population regulation, and the stability of coral-reef fish communities.
Unprecedented population declines and extinctions because of human activities, combined with a growing recognition that such losses affect the stability of ecosystems, underscore the need to better understand how populations persist naturally. We provide field experimental evidence that high biodiversity-in particular, the combined effects of predators and competitors-acts in a way that regulates the size of local fish populations within their coral-reef community. These results indicate that complex interactions among multiple species are necessary for the stability of a highly diverse community, and so forewarn that overexploiting such species may have cascading negative consequences for the entire system.
Carr
Mark H
MH
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. carr@biology.ucsc.edu
Anderson
Todd W
TW
Hixon
Mark A
MA
D000818:Animals; D003063:Cnidaria; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D005399:Fishes / Q000502:physiology*; D011156:Population Density; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D012623:Seawater; D013045:Species Specificity