Ruiz-Moreno, Alfonso, Emslie, Michael J., and Connolly, Sean R. (2024) High response diversity and conspecific density-dependence, not species interactions, drive dynamics of coral reef fish communities. Ecology Letters, 27 (4). e14424.

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Abstract

Species-to-species and species-to-environment interactions are key drivers of community dynamics. Disentangling these drivers in species-rich assemblages is challenging due to the high number of potentially interacting species (the ‘curse of dimensionality’). We develop a process-based model that quantifies how intraspecific and interspecific interactions, and species’ covarying responses to environmental fluctuations, jointly drive community dynamics. We fit the model to reef fish abundance time series from 41 reefs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. We found that fluctuating relative abundances are driven by species’ heterogenous responses to environmental fluctuations, whereas interspecific interactions are negligible. Species differences in long-term average abundances are driven by interspecific variation in the magnitudes of both conspecific density-dependence and density-independent growth rates. This study introduces a novel approach to overcoming the curse of dimensionality, which reveals highly individualistic dynamics in coral reef fish communities that imply a high level of niche structure.

Item ID:	85978
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1461-0248
Keywords:	community dynamics, latent variables, reef fish, regularized horseshoe, response diversity, species interactions, time series
Copyright Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2024 Commonwealth of Australia and The Authors. Ecology Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA.
Funders:	Australian Research Council (ARC)
Projects and Grants:	ARC CE14010002
Date Deposited:	26 Jun 2025 23:15
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310302 Community ecology (excl. invasive species ecology) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1805 Marine systems and management > 180504 Marine biodiversity @ 100%
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