Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation , Scripps Institution of Oceanography , 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0202 , USA.
Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography/Center for Marine Science , University of North Carolina-Wilmington , 601 South College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403 , USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2016 Jun 29;3(6):160262. doi: 10.1098/rsos.160262. eCollection 2016 Jun.
Herbivores play an important role in marine communities. On coral reefs, the diversity and unique feeding behaviours found within this functional group can have a comparably diverse set of impacts in structuring the benthic community. Here, using a spatially explicit model of herbivore foraging, we explore how the spatial pattern of grazing behaviours impacts the recovery of a reef ecosystem, considering movements at two temporal scales-short term (e.g. daily foraging patterns) and longer term (e.g. monthly movements across the landscape). Model simulations suggest that more spatially constrained herbivores are more effective at conferring recovery capability by providing a favourable environment to coral recruitment and growth. Results also show that the composition of food available to the herbivore community is linked directly to the pattern of space use by herbivores. To date, most studies of variability among the impacts of herbivore species have considered the diversity of feeding modes and mouthparts. Our work provides a complementary view of spatial patterns of foraging, revealing that variation in movement behaviours alone can affect patterns of benthic change, and thus broadens our view of realized links between herbivore diversity and reef recovery.
草食动物在海洋生物群落中扮演着重要的角色。在珊瑚礁中，这个功能群中的多样性和独特的摄食行为可以对底栖生物群落的结构产生具有可比性的多样化影响。在这里，我们使用一种草食动物觅食的空间显式模型，来探讨摄食行为的空间模式如何影响珊瑚礁生态系统的恢复，同时考虑到两个时间尺度上的运动——短期（例如每天的觅食模式）和长期（例如每月在景观上的运动）。模型模拟表明，空间限制更大的食草动物通过为珊瑚的繁殖和生长提供有利的环境，更有效地赋予恢复能力。结果还表明，食草动物群落可获得的食物组成与食草动物的空间利用模式直接相关。迄今为止，对食草动物物种影响差异的大多数研究都考虑了摄食模式和口器的多样性。我们的工作提供了觅食空间模式的补充视角，揭示了仅运动行为的变化就可以影响底栖变化的模式，从而拓宽了我们对食草动物多样性与珊瑚礁恢复之间实际联系的认识。
