Competition in an Indo-Pacific hermit crab community.

This article uses a method developed previously (Abrams 1980) to estimate the relative intensities of inter- and intra-specific competition between pairs of species in a highdiversity intertidal hermit crab community in the tropical Indo-Pacific. The community could be separated into two sub-communities, with relatively weak interactions between members of different sub-communities. The average amount of inter-specific competition experienced by the members of this community was greater than that for the species in a less diverse community in Panama (1980). Average competition ratios for the species in the Indo-Pacific community were still less than competition coefficients calculated from overlap data for other taxa of animal.