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An Experimental Test of a Guild: Salamander Competition
Author(s) -
Hairston Nelson G.
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
ecology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.144
H-Index - 294
eISSN - 1939-9170
pISSN - 0012-9658
DOI - 10.2307/1936669
Subject(s) - guild , competition (biology) , salamander , ecology , deciduous , abundance (ecology) , biology , nest (protein structural motif) , resource (disambiguation) , vegetation (pathology) , invertebrate , habitat , medicine , computer network , biochemistry , pathology , computer science
The guild of plethodontid salamanders of the deciduous forest of the southern Appalachians shares the common resource of food, which consists of insects and other invertebrates inhabiting the forest floor and low vegetation. Since in practice, use of the guild concept implies competition for the shared resource, the validity of accepting a guild as delimited for the terrestrial Plethodontidae was tested by field experiments covering the 5 yr 1974—1978. The test consisted of regularly removing the most abundant species, Plethodon jordani, from one set of experimental plots, and the second most abundant species, P. glutinosus, from another set of plots. Each of these two species was favorably affected by the removal of the other P. glutinosus increased significantly in abundance where P. jordani was removed. Removal of P. glutinosus resulted in a significant increase in the proportion of young P. jordani. The remaining species, including the congeneric P. serratus, were not affected by the removal of either of the two most abundant species. The results call into question the common assumption that competition is the organizing force in all coexisting assemblages of species which share common resources. The data also imply that food is not the resource for which P. jordani and P. glutinosus compete. Nest sites may be the critical resource, but much information is needed before they can be implicated.