Abstract
Patchiness of polychaetes at the micro-scale (i.e. proportional to the sphere of influence of an organism) and macro-scale was investigated in the Northwest Atlantic in 1977 and 1981. Seven box-core samples (each 2 500 cm2) from three sites off Nova Scotia, Canada were completely subsampled as 25 contiguous 100cm2 cores and analysed for their polychaete faunas. Dispersion chi-square and autocorrelation analyses were performed on the complete data set. The inshore fauna (St. Margaret's Bay) was strongly clumped with patchiness at several scales: <10cm in diameter, equal to 10 to 50cm (37% of the species), and>50cm. Polychaetes in samples from off-shore stations were much less aggregated, and discordantly dispersed to varying degrees. The results conform with the present understanding of infaunal spatial patterns and reject the hypothesis that a depth gradient in patchiness exists in addition to the well documented density and biomass gradients.
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Communicated by R. W. Doyle, Halifax
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Volckaert, F. Spatial pattern of soft-bottom Polychaeta off Nova Scotia, Canada. Mar. Biol. 93, 627–639 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00392800
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00392800