Deep-sea species richness: regional and local diversity estimates from quantitative bottom samples
Article Abstract:
A quantitative study of species richness in the deep sea was undertaken through sampling done at 14 stations in a 176 kilometer transect along the continental rise off Delaware and New Jersey. The samples were taken at depths of 1,500 to 2,500 meters. Two hundred thirty-three samples taken over two years yielded 798 species representing 14 phyla. The number of species doubled to 1,597 when other sampling stations to the north and to the south were included. This indicated that the total number of species inhabiting the ocean floor can well number to the millions instead of the 160,000 marine species estimated by G. Thorson in 1971.
Publication Name: The American Naturalist
Subject: Earth sciences
ISSN: 0003-0147
Year: 1992
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
Historical effects and sorting processes as explanations for contemporary ecological patterns: character syndromes in Mediterranean woody plants
Article Abstract:
Determinants of ecological pattern must include historical effects and sorting processes aside from phylogenetic constraints and adaptive processes. Historical effects partake in site specific historical informations relative to the dynamics of species assemblages and enduring properties of studied species. Species sorting processes define varied proportional representations in assemblages of the same species with different characteristics. These factors were used in determining the covariation among life-history traits of a woody flora in southwestern Spain.
Publication Name: The American Naturalist
Subject: Earth sciences
ISSN: 0003-0147
Year: 1992
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
Recruitment near conspecific adults and the maintenance of tree and shrub diversity in a neotropical forest
Article Abstract:
The hypothesis that inhibition of recruitment near conspecific adults by herbivores and pathogens promotes species diversity by allowing persistence of rare or competitively inferior species greater chances to persist was tested. The study area was a 50-hectare plot in a tropical forest in Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The recruitment patterns in the study area did not fit the predictions of the hypothesis, although there were two or three species in which densities could be due to inhibition of local recruitment.
Publication Name: The American Naturalist
Subject: Earth sciences
ISSN: 0003-0147
Year: 1992
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
- Abstracts: Species richness and population limitation in insect parasitoid-host systems. Parasitoid species richness, host mortality, and biological control
- Abstracts: Experimental reconstruction of sodic dolomitic carbonatite melts from metasomatised lithosphere. Internally consistent gahnitic spinel-cordierite-garnet equilibria in the FMASHZn system: geothermobarometry and applications
- Abstracts: Large-scale transpressive shear zone patterns and displacements within magmatic arcs: The Coast Plutonic Complex, British Columbia
- Abstracts: Tectonics of the Arabian margin associated with the formation and exhumation of high-pressure rocks, Sultanate of Oman
- Abstracts: Foreland normal fault control on northwest Himalayan thrust front development. U-Pb zircon ages from the Indian plate in northwest Pakistan and their significance to Himalayan and pre-Himalayan geologic history