Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Latitudinal gradients of dispersal and niche processes mediating neutral assembly of marine fish communities

  • Original paper
  • Published:
Marine Biology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Elucidating the relative importance of niche and neutral processes in structuring ecological communities is a major goal of ecology. We considered multiple components of community structure (beta diversity, species abundance distributions, and niche specialisation) and spatial scales to identify the processes structuring marine fish communities along a tropical to temperate gradient. Beta diversity was explained by local scale environmental and spatial variables, with geographic distance and environmental gradients being stronger drivers of species turnover in tropical and temperate study areas, respectively. Species abundance distributions found a significant component of community structure in all regions to not differ from that expected by chance. Niche specialisation was more prevalent among the endemic, temperate fish species than in tropical fishes. Our results support a strong neutral component of marine fish community assembly, regardless of bioregion. A change in importance from dispersal limitation to niche filtering processes was found from tropical to temperate communities, superimposed over neutrally assembled marine fish communities.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Anderson MJ, Ellingsen KE, McArdle BH (2006) Multivariate dispersion as a measure of beta diversity. Ecol Lett 9:683–693

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Anderson MJ, Crist TO, Chase JM, Vellend M, Inouye BD, Freestone AL, Sanders NJ, Cornell HV, Comita LS, Davies KF (2011) Navigating the multiple meanings of β diversity: a roadmap for the practicing ecologist. Ecol Lett 14:19–28

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Arellano G, Tello JS, Jørgensen PM, Fuentes AF, Loza MI, Torrez V, Macía MJ (2016) Disentangling environmental and spatial processes of community assembly in tropical forests from local to regional scales. Oikos 125:326–335

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baselga A (2010) Partitioning the turnover and nestedness components of beta diversity. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 19:134–143

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baselga A, Jimenez-Valverde A, Niccolini G (2007) A multiple-site similarity measure independent of richness. Biol Let 3:642–645

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baselga A, Orme D, Villeger S, De Bortoli J, Leprieur F (2013) betapart: partitioning beta diversity into turnover and nestedness components. R package version 1.3. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=betapart

  • Blanchet FG, Legendre P, Borcard D (2008) Forward selection of explanatory variables. Ecology 89:2623–2632. https://doi.org/10.1890/07-0986.1

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Borcard D, Gillet F, Legendre P (2011) Numerical ecology with R. Springer, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bowman AW, Azzalini A (2014) R package ‘sm’: nonparametric smoothing methods (version 2.2–5.4). http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/~adrian/sm, http://azzalini.stat.unipd.it/Book_sm

  • Bradbury IR, Laurel B, Snelgrove PVR, Bentzen P, Campana SE (2008) Global patterns in marine dispersal estimates: the influence of geography, taxonomic category and life history. Proc R Soc B Biol Sci 275:1803–1809. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2008.0216

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brown JH (2014) Why marine islands are farther apart in the tropics. Am Nat 183:842–846

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Chase JM, Myers JA (2011) Disentangling the importance of ecological niches from stochastic processes across scales. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 366:2351–2363

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chase JM, Kraft NJB, Smith KG, Vellend M, Inouye BD (2011) Using null models to disentangle variation in community dissimilarity from variation in a-diversity. Ecosphere 2:art24. https://doi.org/10.1890/es1810-00117.00111

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chust G, Villarino E, Chenuil A, Irigoien X, Bizsel N, Bode A, Broms C, Claus S, Fernández de Puelles ML, Fonda-Umani S, Hoarau G, Mazzocchi MG, Mozetič P, Vandepitte L, Veríssimo H, Zervoudaki S, Borja A (2016) Dispersal similarly shapes both population genetics and community patterns in the marine realm. Sci Rep 6:28730

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Cowen RK, Sponaugle S (2009) Larval dispersal and marine population connectivity. Annu Rev Mar Sci 1:443–466

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cushman SA, McGarigal K (2002) Hierarchical, multi-scale decomposition of species-environment relationships. Landsc Ecol 17:637–646

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DiBattista JD, Travers MJ, Moore GI, Evans RD, Newman SJ, Feng M, Moyle SD, Gorton RJ, Saunders T, Berry O (2017) Seascape genomics reveals fine-scale patterns of dispersal for a reef fish along the ecologically divergent coast of Northwestern Australia. Mol Ecol. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.14352

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Dray S, Legendre P, Peres-Neto PR (2006) Spatial modelling: a comprehensive framework for principal coordinate analysis of neighbour matrices (PCNM). Ecol Model 196:483–493

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ebeling AW, Hixon MA (1991) Tropical and temperate reef fishes: comparison of community structures. In: Sale PF (ed) The ecology of fishes on coral reefs. Academic, San Diego

    Google Scholar 

  • Etienne RS (2005) A new sampling formula for neutral biodiversity. Ecol Lett 8:253–260

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Etienne RS (2007) A neutral sampling formula for multiple samples and an ‘‘exact’’ test of neutrality. Ecol Lett 10:608–618

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fajmonová Z, Zelený D, Syrovátka V, Vončina G, Hájek M (2013) Distribution of habitat specialists in semi-natural grasslands. J Veg Sci 24:616–627

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ford BM, Stewart BA, Roberts JD (2017) Species pools and habitat complexity define west Australian marine fish community composition. Mar Ecol Prog Ser 574:157–166. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps12167

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fridley JD, Vandermast DB, Kuppinger DM, Manthey M, Peet RK (2007) Co-occurrence based assessment of habitat generalists and specialists: a new approach for the measurement of niche width. J Ecol 95:707–722

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fukami T (2010) Community assembly dynamics in space. In: Verhoef HA, Morin PJ (eds) Community ecology: processes, models, and applications. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 45–54

    Google Scholar 

  • Geange SW, Poulos DE, Stier AC, McCormick MI (2017) The relative influence of abundance and priority effects on colonization success in a coral-reef fish. Coral Reefs 36:151–155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-016-1503-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilbert B, Lechowicz MJ (2004) Neutrality, niches, and dispersal in a temperate forest understory. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 101:7651–7656

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Hankin RKS (2007) Introducing untb, an R package for simulating ecological drift under the unified nuetral theory of biodiversity. J Stat Softw 22:1–18

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harborne AR, Mumby PJ, Żychaluk K, Hedley JD, Blackwell PG (2006) Modeling the beta diversity of coral reefs. Ecology 87:2871–2881

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • HilleRisLambers J, Adler P, Harpole W, Levine J, Mayfield M (2012) Rethinking community assembly through the lens of coexistence theory. Annu Rev Ecol Evol Syst 43:227

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hixon MA (2011) 60 years of coral reef fish ecology: past, present, future. Bull Mar Sci 87:727–765

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hubbell SP (2001) The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography. Monographs in population biology, vol 32. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Hubbell SP (2006) Neutral theory and the evolution of ecological equivalence. Ecology 87:1387–1398

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hurtt GC, Pacala SW (1995) The consequences of recruitment limitation: reconciling chance, history and competitive differences between plants. J Theor Biol 176:1–12

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hutchinson GE (1959) Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kinds of animals? Am Nat 93:145–159

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jabot F, Chave J (2011) Analyzing tropical forest tree species abundance distributions using a nonneutral model and through approximate Bayesian inference. Am Nat 178:E37–E47

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Janzen T, Alzate A, Muschick M, Maan ME, Plas F, Etienne RS (2017) Community assembly in Lake Tanganyika cichlid fish: quantifying the contributions of both niche-based and neutral processes. Ecol Evol 7:1057–1067

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Jenkins DG, Ricklefs RE (2011) Biogeography and ecology: two views of one world. Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 366:2331–2335. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0064

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson DW (2006) Predation, habitat complexity, and variation in density-dependent mortality of temperate reef fishes. Ecology 87:1179–1188

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Jones MM, Tuomisto H, Clark DB, Olivas P (2006) Effects of mesoscale environmental heterogeneity and dispersal limitation on floristic variation in rain forest ferns. J Ecol 94:181–195

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Keddy PA (1992) Assembly and response rules: two goals for predictive community ecology. J Veg Sci 3:157–164. https://doi.org/10.2307/3235676

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kendrick GA, Harvey ES, Wernberg T, Harman N, Goldberg N (2004) The role of disturbance in maintaining diversity of benthic macroalgal assemblages in southwestern Australia. Jpn J Phycol 52(Supplement):5–9

    Google Scholar 

  • Knapp KR, Kruk MC, Levinson DH, Diamond HJ, Neumann CJ (2010) The International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS): unifying tropical cyclone best track data. Bull Am Meteor Soc 91:363–376

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kraft NJ, Comita LS, Chase JM, Sanders NJ, Swenson NG, Crist TO, Stegen JC, Vellend M, Boyle B, Anderson MJ (2011) Disentangling the drivers of β diversity along latitudinal and elevational gradients. Science 333:1755–1758

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Kraft NJ, Adler PB, Godoy O, James EC, Fuller S, Levine JM (2015) Community assembly, coexistence and the environmental filtering metaphor. Funct Ecol 29:592–599

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Last PR, White WT, Gledhill DC, Pogonoski JJ, Lyne V, Bax NJ (2011) Biogeographical structure and affinities of the marine demersal ichthyofauna of Australia. J Biogeogr 38:1484–1496

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Legendre P, Anderson MJ (1999) Distance-based redundancy analysis: testing multispecies responses in multifactorial ecological experiments. Ecol Monogr 69:1–24

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Legendre P, Cáceres M (2013) Beta diversity as the variance of community data: dissimilarity coefficients and partitioning. Ecol Lett 16:951–963

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Legendre P, Mi XC, Ren HB, Ma KP, Yu MJ, Sun IF, He FL (2009) Partitioning beta diversity in a subtropical broad-leaved forest of China. Ecology 90:663–674. https://doi.org/10.1890/07-1880.1

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Legendre P, Borcard D, Blanchet FG, Dray S (2013) PCNM: MEM spatial eigenfunction and principal coordinate analyses. R package version 2.1-2/r109. https://R-Forge.R-project.org/projects/sedar/

  • Leis JM, Caselle JE, Bradbury IR, Kristiansen T, Llopiz JK, Miller MJ, O’Connor MI, Paris CB, Shanks AL, Sogard SM, Swearer SE, Treml EA, Vetter RD, Warner RR (2013) Does fish larval dispersal differ between high and low latitudes? Proc R Soc B Biol Sci 280:20130327. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.0327

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levin SA (1992) The problem of pattern and scale in ecology: the Robert H. MacArthur award lecture. Ecology 73:1943–1967

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levin PS (1993) Habitat structure, conspecific presence and spatial variation in the recruitment of a temperate reef fish. Oecologia 94:176–185

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Louette G, De Meester L (2007) Predation and priority effects in experimental zooplankton communities. Oikos 116:419–426

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacArthur RH, Wilson EO (1967) The theory of island biogeography. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Manthey M, Fridley JD (2009) Beta diversity metrics and the estimation of niche width via species co-occurrence data: reply to Zeleny. J Ecol 97:18–22

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matthews TJ, Whittaker RJ (2014) Neutral theory and the species abundance distribution: recent developments and prospects for unifying niche and neutral perspectives. Ecol Evol 4:2263–2277

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Munoz F, Couteron P, Ramesh BR, Etienne RS (2007) Estimating parameters of neutral communities: from one single large to several small samples. Ecology 88:2482–2488

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Murphy HM, Jenkins GP (2010) Observational methods used in marine spatial monitoring of fishes and associated habitats: a review. Mar Freshw Res 61:236–252. https://doi.org/10.1071/MF09068

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Myers JA, LaManna JA (2016) The promise and pitfalls of β-diversity in ecology and conservation. J Veg Sci 27:1081–1083

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Myers JA, Chase JM, Jiménez I, Jørgensen PM, Araujo-Murakami A, Paniagua-Zambrana N, Seidel R (2013) Beta-diversity in temperate and tropical forests reflects dissimilar mechanisms of community assembly. Ecol Lett 16:151–157

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Ogle DH (2017) FSA: fisheries stock analysis. R package version 0.8.13

  • Oksanen J, Blanchet FG, Friendly M, Kindt R, Legendre P, McGlinn D, Minchin PR, O’Hara RB, Simpson GL, Solymos P, Stevens MHH, Szoecs E, Wagner H (2017) vegan: community Ecology Package. R package version 2.4–3. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=vegan

  • Pérez-Matus A, Shima JS (2010) Disentangling the effects of macroalgae on the abundance of temperate reef fishes. J Exp Mar Biol Ecol 388:1–10

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quantum GIS Development Team (2016) QGIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project. http://qgis.osgeo.org

  • R Core Team (2017) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. http://www.R-project.org/

  • Sale PF (1977) Maintenance of high diversity in coral reef fish communities. Am Nat 111(978):337–359

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sale PF (1978) Coexistence of coral reef fishes—a lottery for living space. Environ Biol Fishes 3:85–102

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Si X, Baselga A, Ding P (2015) Revealing beta-diversity patterns of breeding bird and lizard communities on inundated land-bridge islands by separating the turnover and nestedness components. PLoS One 10:e0127692

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Siegel D, Mitarai S, Costello C, Gaines S, Kendall B, Warner R, Winters K (2008) The stochastic nature of larval connectivity among nearshore marine populations. Proc Natl Acad Sci 105:8974–8979

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • Sousa WP (1984) The role of disturbance in natural communities. Annu Rev Ecol Syst 15:353–391

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spalding MD, Fox HE, Allen GR, Davidson N, Ferdaña ZA, Finlayson M, Halpern BS, Jorge MA, Lombana A, Lourie SA (2007) Marine ecoregions of the world: a bioregionalization of coastal and shelf areas. Bioscience 57:573–583

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stegen JC, Freestone AL, Crist TO, Anderson MJ, Chase JM, Comita LS, Cornell HV, Davies KF, Harrison SP, Hurlbert AH (2013) Stochastic and deterministic drivers of spatial and temporal turnover in breeding bird communities. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 22:202–212

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stier AC, Hanson KM, Holbrook SJ, Schmitt RJ, Brooks AJ (2014) Predation and landscape characteristics independently affect reef fish community organization. Ecology 95:1294–1307

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Trisos CH, Petchey OL, Tobias JA (2014) Unraveling the interplay of community assembly processes acting on multiple niche axes across spatial scales. Am Nat 184:593–608

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Tucker CM, Shoemaker LG, Davies KF, Nemergut DR, Melbourne BA (2016) Differentiating between niche and neutral assembly in metacommunities using null models of β-diversity. Oikos 125:778–789

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tyberghein L, Verbruggen H, Pauly K, Troupin C, Mineur F, De Clerck O (2012) Bio-ORACLE: a global environmental dataset for marine species distribution modelling. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 21:272–281

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ulrich W, Baselga A, Kusumoto B, Shiono T, Tuomisto H, Kubota Y (2017) The tangled link between β-and γ-diversity: a Narcissus effect weakens statistical inferences in null model analyses of diversity patterns. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 26:1–5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van der Plas F, Janzen T, Ordonez A, Fokkema W, Reinders J, Etienne RS, Olff H (2015) A new modeling approach estimates the relative importance of different community assembly processes. Ecology 96:1502–1515

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vellend M (2010) Conceptual synthesis in community ecology. Q Rev Biol 85:183–206

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Vellend M, Srivastava DS, Anderson KM, Brown CD, Jankowski JE, Kleynhans EJ, Kraft NJ, Letaw AD, Macdonald AAM, Maclean JE (2014) Assessing the relative importance of neutral stochasticity in ecological communities. Oikos 123:1420–1430

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Viana DS, Figuerola J, Schwenk K, Manca M, Hobæk A, Mjelde M, Preston C, Gornall R, Croft J, King R (2016) Assembly mechanisms determining high species turnover in aquatic communities over regional and continental scales. Ecography 39:281–288

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeleny D (2008) Co-occurrence based assessment of species habitat specialization is affected by the size of species pool: reply to Fridley et al. (2007). J Ecol 97:10–17

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Data from Esperance, Bremer Bay, Albany, Rottnest Island, and Jurien and the Abrolhos Islands were collected through funding provided by an Australian and Western Australian Government Natural Heritage Trust Strategic Project, ‘Securing Western Australia’s Marine Futures’. We thank South Coast Natural Resource Management for access to the data and the staff of the Marine Futures team who collected the data. Dampier data was collected for Woodside Energy, who is thanked for access to this data. Ben Fitzpatrick is thanked for providing the Ningaloo data, Jock Clough is thanked for providing the Shark Bay data, and Helen Shortland-Jones is thanked for collating the data. Bronte Van Helden is thanked for comments on a draft.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre of Excellence in Natural Resource Management, University of Western Australia, Albany, WA, 6330, Australia

    Benjamin M. Ford & J. Dale Roberts

Authors
  1. Benjamin M. Ford
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. J. Dale Roberts
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Benjamin M. Ford.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All applicable international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed. All procedures performed in studies involving animals were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted.

Additional information

Responsible Editor: K. D. Clements.

Reviewed by Undisclosed experts.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (PDF 1219 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ford, B.M., Roberts, J.D. Latitudinal gradients of dispersal and niche processes mediating neutral assembly of marine fish communities. Mar Biol 165, 94 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-018-3356-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-018-3356-5

Search

Navigation