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Consumers decrease variability across space and turnover through time during coral reef succession

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Abstract

Consumers play an integral role in mediating ecological succession—the change in community composition over time. As consumer populations are facing rapid decline in ecosystems around the world, understanding of their ecological role is becoming increasingly urgent. Increased understanding of how changes in consumer populations may influence community variability across space and turnover through time during succession is particularly important for coral reefs, which are among the most threatened ecosystems globally, and where fishes play vital roles in structuring benthic succession. Here, we examine how consumers influence coral reef succession by deploying 180 paired settlement tiles, caged (to exclude fishes larger than approximately 15 cm) and uncaged, within Palmyra Atoll, a remote marine wildlife refuge with previously documented high fish abundance, and monitored benthic community development one and three years after deployment. We found that excluding large fishes lead to lower alpha diversity and divergent community states across space (i.e.,, high beta diversity among caged tiles), suggesting that benthic fish feeding maintains local diversity but tends to homogenize community composition with dominance by crustose coralline algae. In addition, when fish were experimentally excluded, the developing benthic community exhibited a greater change in species composition over time (i.e., high temporal beta diversity), indicating that fish feeding tends to canalize community successional trajectories. Finally, the caged and uncaged tiles became more similar over time, suggesting that fish feeding plays a more important role during early succession. Our results demonstrate that the loss of large fishes, for example from overfishing, may result in benthic communities that are more variable across space and time. Increased variability could have important implications for ecosystem function and coral reef resilience in the face of escalating global stressors.

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Availability of data and materials

All data are available at https://github.com/JamieMcDevittIrwin/McDevittIrwin_etal_PalmyraTileSuccession.

Code availability

All code for statistical analyses is available at https://github.com/JamieMcDevittIrwin/McDevittIrwin_etal_PalmyraTileSuccession.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Alan Nunez and Victoria Dubeau for help with CPCe classification and Sabina Perkins, Paul Leary and Ana Sofia Guerra for help in the field. We thank Tadashi Fukami for helpful discussion and feedback on statistical analyses and interpretation of results.

Funding

This work was supported through funding by the Reef Tomorrow Initiative, through a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postgraduate Scholarship for JMI, and a grant from the Bertarelli Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University, Pacific Grove, CA, USA

    Jamie M. McDevitt-Irwin, Timothy D. White, Joseph G. Wible & Fiorenza Micheli

  2. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology and Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Douglas J. McCauley

  3. Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, Watsonville, CA, USA

    Daniel R. Brumbaugh

  4. Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Daniel R. Brumbaugh & Francis H. Joyce

  5. School for Biological Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Franziska Elmer

  6. Center for Marine Resource Studies, School for Field Studies, Cockburn Harbour, South Caicos, Turks and Caicos Islands

    Franziska Elmer

  7. Fish and Wildlife Conservation Department, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Francesco Ferretti

  8. Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University, Pacific Grove, CA, USA

    Fiorenza Micheli

  9. Oceans Department, Stanford University, Pacific Grove, CA, USA

    Fiorenza Micheli

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  1. Jamie M. McDevitt-Irwin
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  2. Douglas J. McCauley
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  4. Franziska Elmer
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  7. Timothy D. White
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  9. Fiorenza Micheli
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JMI wrote the initial draft and performed the analyses while DM, DB, FE, FF, FJ, TW, JW and FM collected the data and contributed to the writing.

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Correspondence to Jamie M. McDevitt-Irwin.

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Communicated by Jonathan Shurin.

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McDevitt-Irwin, J.M., McCauley, D.J., Brumbaugh, D.R. et al. Consumers decrease variability across space and turnover through time during coral reef succession. Oecologia 202, 431–443 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-023-05404-y

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