Search results for "Ecological release"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Marine reserves : fish life history and ecological traits matter
2010
Copyright by the Ecological Society of America
Species loss leads to community closure
2008
Global extinction of a species is sadly irreversible. At a local scale, however, extinctions may be followed by re-invasion. We here show that this is not necessarily the case and that an ecological community may close its doors for re-invasion of species lost from it. Previous studies of how communities are assembled have shown that there may be rules for that process and that limitations are set to the order by which species are introduced and put together. Instead of focusing on the assembly process we randomly generated simple competitive model communities that were stable and allowed for two to 10 coexisting species. When a randomly selected single species was removed from the communit…
Dietary and Temporal Niche Differentiation in Tropical Ants-Can They Explain Local Ant Coexistence?
2014
How species with similar ecological requirements avoid competitive exclusion remains contentious, especially in the species-rich tropics. Niche differentiation has been proposed as a major mechanism for species coexistence. However, different niche dimensions must be studied simultaneously to assess their combined effects on diversity and composition of a community. In most terrestrial ecosystems, ants are among the most abundant and ubiquitous animals. Since they display direct, aggressive competition and often competitively displace subordinate species from resources, niche differentiation may be especially relevant among ants. We studied temporal and trophic niche differentiation in a gr…
Jack of all trades, master of all: a positive association between habitat niche breadth and foraging performance in pit-building antlion larvae.
2012
Species utilizing a wide range of resources are intuitively expected to be less efficient in exploiting each resource type compared to species which have developed an optimal phenotype for utilizing only one or a few resources. We report here the results of an empirical study whose aim was to test for a negative association between habitat niche breadth and foraging performance. As a model system to address this question, we used two highly abundant species of pit-building antlions varying in their habitat niche breadth: the habitat generalist Myrmeleon hyalinus, which inhabits a variety of soil types but occurs mainly in sandy soils, and the habitat specialist Cueta lineosa, which is restr…
Climate change exacerbates interspecific interactions in sympatric coastal fishes
2012
Summary 1. Biological responses to warming are presently based on the assumption that species will remain within their bioclimatic envelope as environmental conditions change. As a result, changes in the relative abundance of several marine species have been documented over the last decades. This suggests that warming may drive novel interspecific interactions to occur (i.e. invasive vs. native species) or may intensify the strength of pre-existing ones (i.e. warm vs. cold adapted). For mobile species, habitat relocation is a viable solution to track tolerable conditions and reduce competitive costs, resulting in ‘winner’ species dominating the best quality habitat at the expense of ‘loser’…
Geographic variability of ecological niches of plant species: are competition and stress relevant?
2002
A species’ niche position may differ strongly between geographic regions, for instance due to the effect of competitors or ecophysiological stress. However, it is unclear whether such strong geographic niche variation is the rule or the exception. We compared the niche positions of plant species between central England and eastern central Europe (as available from the literature), using phylogenetically independent contrasts. We found that most species occupied similar niche positions in both regions. More importantly, we found that niche variation was not higher in species susceptible to competitive displacement. Nor was niche variation higher in species that reach the edge of their range …