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The control of rank-abundance distributions by a competitive despotic species

  • Community ecology - Original research
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Abstract

Accounting for differences in abundances among species remains a high priority for community ecology. While there has been more than 80 years of work on trying to explain the characteristic S shape of rank-abundance distributions (RADs), there has been recent conjecture that the form may not depend on ecological processes per se but may be a general phenomenon arising in many unrelated disciplines. We show that the RAD shape can be influenced by an ecological process, namely, interference competition. The noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala) is a hyperaggressive, ‘despotic’ bird that occurs over much of eastern Australia (>106 km2). We compiled data for bird communities from 350 locations within its range, which were collected using standard avian survey methods. We used hierarchical Bayesian models to show that the RAD shape was much altered when the abundance of the strong interactor exceeded a threshold density; RADs consistently were steeper when the density of the noisy miner ≥2.5 birds ha−1. The structure of bird communities at sites where the noisy miner exceeded this density was very different from that at sites where the densities fell below the threshold: species richness and Shannon diversity were much reduced, but mean abundances and mean avian biomass per site did not differ substantially.

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Acknowledgments

Funding support came from the Australian Research Council grant nos. A19531268, LP0775264 and DP120100797, Land and Water Australia grant nos. DUV2 and USQ12. Michiala Bowen, Alison Howe and Gregory F. B. Horrocks assisted with field-data collection. Jim R. Thomson, Jian Yen, Brian McGill and Rampal Etienne provided advice on this and related manuscripts. We thank Hannu Pöysä, Ken Locey and an anonymous reviewer for comments that much improved the manuscript. This research was conducted with Animal Ethics Committee approval from Monash University and the University of Queensland. Field research was carried out under permit for the Wildlife Act 1975 and the National Parks Act 1975.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Applied Ecology, The University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, 2617, Australia

    Ralph Mac Nally

  2. Landscape Ecology and Conservation Group, School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Clive A. McAlpine & Martine Maron

  3. Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Clive A. McAlpine & Hugh P. Possingham

  4. Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire, SL5 7PY, UK

    Hugh P. Possingham

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  1. Ralph Mac Nally
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  4. Martine Maron
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Correspondence to Ralph Mac Nally.

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Communicated by Hannu Pöysä.

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Mac Nally, R., McAlpine, C.A., Possingham, H.P. et al. The control of rank-abundance distributions by a competitive despotic species. Oecologia 176, 849–857 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3060-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3060-1

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