Extinction Debt and Colonizer Credit on a Habitat Perturbed Fishing Bank.

ABSTRACT: Temporal changes in occupancy of the Georges Bank (NE USA) fish and invertebrate community were examined and interpreted in the context of systems ecological theory of extinction debt (EDT). EDT posits that in a closed system with a mix of competitor and colonizer species and experiencing habitat fragmentation and loss, the competitor species will show a gradual decline in fitness (occupancy) eventually leading to their extinction (extirpation) over multiple generations. A corollary of this is a colonizer credit, where colonizer species occupancy may increase with fragmentation because the disturbance gives that life history a transient relative competitive advantage. We found that competitor species occupancy decreased in time concomitant with an increase in occupancy of colonizer species

SUBMITTER: Duplisea DE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5125594 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature