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Predation and competition effects on the size diversity of aquatic communities

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Abstract

Body size has been widely recognised as a key factor determining community structure in ecosystems. We analysed size diversity patterns of phytoplankton, zooplankton and fish assemblages in 13 data sets from freshwater and marine sites with the aim to assess whether there is a general trend in the effect of predation and resource competition on body size distribution across a wide range of aquatic ecosystems. We used size diversity as a measure of the shape of size distribution. Size diversity was computed based on the Shannon-Wiener diversity expression, adapted to a continuous variable, i.e. as body size. Our results show that greater predation pressure was associated with reduced size diversity of prey at all trophic levels. In contrast, competition effects depended on the trophic level considered. At upper trophic levels (zooplankton and fish), size distributions were more diverse when potential resource availability was low, suggesting that competitive interactions for resources promote diversification of aquatic communities by size. This pattern was not found for phytoplankton size distributions where size diversity mostly increased with low zooplankton grazing and increasing nutrient availability. Relationships we found were weak, indicating that predation and competition are not the only determinants of size distribution. Our results suggest that predation pressure leads to accumulation of organisms in the less predated sizes, while resource competition tends to favour a wider size distribution.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the Comisión de Investigación Científica y Técnica (CICYT), Programa de Investigación Fundamental (CGL2008–05778/BOS and CGL2011-23907). We thank Dr. Dietmar Straile, who provided zooplankton data on Lake Constance. S. Brucet’s contribution was supported by the Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship No. 330249 (CLIMBING).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Aquatic Ecology and Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Girona, Girona, Spain

    Xavier D. Quintana, Dani Boix, Jordi Compte, Stéphanie Gascón & Rocío López-Flores

  2. Departamento de Ecología y Evolución, Facultad de Ciencias-Centro Universitario Regional Este (CURE), Univ. de la República, Maldonado, Uruguay

    Matías Arim

  3. Department of Wetland Ecology, Doñana Biological Station (EBD)-CSIC Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain

    Anna Badosa

  4. Department of Ecology and Geology, University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    José María Blanco

  5. BETA Technology Centre, Aquatic Ecology Group, University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia, Vic, Spain

    Anna Badosa & Sandra Brucet

  6. Department of Applied Mathematics III, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Juan J. Egozcue

  7. Marine Institute, Furnace, Newport, Co. Mayo, Ireland

    Elvira de Eyto

  8. Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Ursula Gaedke

  9. Instituto Español de Oceanografía, Málaga, Spain

    Luis Gil de Solá

  10. Zoology Department, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

    Kenneth Irvine

  11. Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Silkeborg, Denmark

    Sandra Brucet, Erik Jeppesen, Torben L. Lauridsen & Martin Søndergaard

  12. Area de Ecología, Escuela Politécnica Superior de Huesca, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

    Rocío López-Flores

  13. Department of Biology and Ecology of Fishes, Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Berlin, Germany

    Thomas Mehner

  14. Area de Ecología, Facultad de Biología, Universidad de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Susana Romo

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  1. Xavier D. Quintana
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  2. Matías Arim
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  3. Anna Badosa
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Correspondence to Xavier D. Quintana.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6.

Table 6 Complete list of predation-related and competition-related balances used as explanatory variables in the stepwise multiple regression, where the response variable is the size diversity of each data set
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Quintana, X.D., Arim, M., Badosa, A. et al. Predation and competition effects on the size diversity of aquatic communities. Aquat Sci 77, 45–57 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-014-0368-1

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