Dominance and Diversity Maintenance in an Oceanic Ecosystem

Disturbance—perturbation, dispersal—reaction, and contemporaneous disequilibrium are similar theories used to explain the maintenance of species diversity in communities. These theories explicitly predict that in patches, on certain time—space scales, there should be substantial shifts in the order of species dominance. There is good evidence that these theories may explain species coexistence in terrestrial and marine systems of sessile organisms. We have tested this set of theories in a mobile pelagic system by examining the order of dominance of copepod species in samples separated in time and space, collected from °30 min to 16 yr apart, and from hundreds of metres to thousands of kilometres apart. We could not detect significant changes among the samples in rank order or in percent similarity of species abundance on any time scale, or on any space scale up to °800 km, either when all 175 species or when only the 30 most abundant were considered. There was small—scale, mesoscale, seasonal, and interannual heterogeneity in physical properties during the time we made our measurements. Although the theories are satisfactory explanations of diversity maintenance in sessile systems, our results fail to validate them in our mobile pelagic system. Because there were episodes of significant physical variability and because of the long—term species equilibrium and constancy of dominance, we believe our highly diverse community to be resilient and robust, rather than fragile. The regulatory forces are strong and almost certainly biological, rather than physical, but we cannot identify them.