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Variability effects by consumers exceed their average effects across an environmental gradient of mussel recruitment

  • Community ecology – original research
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Abstract

The implicit assumption that properties of natural systems deduced from the average statistics from random samples suffice for understanding them focuses the attention of ecologists on the average effects of processes and responses, and often, to view their variability as noise. Yet, both kinds of effects can drive dynamics of ecological systems and their covariation may confound interpretation. Predation by crabs and snails on competitively dominant mussels has long been recognized as an important process structuring communities on rocky shores of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. We experimentally manipulated the average intensity of predation in plots across a gradient of mussel recruitment to separately estimate the average and variability of responses of mussel recruitment and community composition. Predation did not affect the average number of mussels recruited to plots, nor the average multivariate composition of the community. Plots from which predators were excluded showed a ~ 30% increase in spatial variability of mussel recruitment. After 1 year, the spatial variability in community composition was greater than that observed among plots that predators could access. An important, but less recognized, aspect of predation is its dampening effect on variability of community structure. As accelerating rates of environmental change disrupt species interactions, variability effects of ecological processes and corresponding responses are likely to be increasingly important determinants of community dynamics.

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All data associated with this study will be deposited with the Environmental Data Initiative upon acceptance of the manuscript.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant Nos. DEB-1020480 and DEB-1555641 to S. R. Dudgeon and P. S. Petraitis, funding from the CSUN Office of Research and Sponsored Projects to S. R. Dudgeon, and an Addison E. Verrill Darling Marine Center (U. Maine) Visiting Graduate Fellowship, a CSUN Graduate Equity Fellowships to A. Mutti and grants to A. Mutti from The PADI Foundation and the Burnand-Partridge Foundation. This study was inspired by papers of L. Benedetti-Cecchi on variability effects. We are grateful to J. E. Kübler and P. Petraitis for discussions over the years that encouraged comparison of average and variability effects, as well as reviews by Jeremy Long, Steve Hawkins, and three anonymous reviewers that vastly improved this paper.

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  1. Department of Biology, California State University, Northridge, CA, 91330-8303, USA

    Alexa Mutti, Iris Kübler-Dudgeon & Steve Dudgeon

  2. California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Santa Barbara, CA, 93109, USA

    Alexa Mutti

  3. Department of Mathematics, University of California San Diego, LaJolla, 92093, USA

    Iris Kübler-Dudgeon

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  1. Alexa Mutti
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SD and AM conceived and designed the experiments. AM, IKD and SD executed the experiments. IKD and AM collected the data. SD analyzed the data. SD and AM wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Steve Dudgeon.

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Communicated by Jeremy Long.

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Mutti, A., Kübler-Dudgeon, I. & Dudgeon, S. Variability effects by consumers exceed their average effects across an environmental gradient of mussel recruitment. Oecologia 196, 539–552 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-021-04951-6

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