title: Biodiversity, population regulation, and the stability of coral-reef fish communities.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. carr@biology.ucsc.edu
authors.forename: Mark H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Carr
authors.forename: Todd W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Anderson
authors.forename: Mark A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Hixon
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003063:Cnidaria; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D005399:Fishes / Q000502:physiology*; D011156:Population Density; D011235:Predatory Behavior; D012623:Seawater; D013045:Species Specificity