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Biogeography

Competition exposed by knight?

Nature volume 396, pages 216–217 (1998)Cite this article

“To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts” — so ran the famous opening sentence of Robert MacArthur's Geographical Ecology 1. There is no better exemplar than Jared Diamond's attempt, three years later, to extract pattern and meaning from a mass of biogeographical data on bird species on islands around New Guinea2. The data and Diamond's interpretation of them have been controversial, but they have now been re-evaluated by Sanderson, Moulton and Selfridge, writing in Oecologia 3.

One pattern that stood out in Diamond's analysis was a lack of co-occurrence of certain bird species, which nonetheless have interdigitating geographical distributions —that is, the species occur throughout the archipelago. He interpreted this pattern as evidence of diffusely acting competitive exclusion, by which he meant species were excluded from certain islands by the combined competitive influence of a set of others; he therefore built competition into a set of rules that appeared to have governed the assembly of communities of bird species on islands. This touched off a long and sometimes acrimonious debate about the statistical evidence for competition in nature4,5,6. Sanderson et al. 3 report how they have overcome statistical limitations of previous analyses. Their results provide support for Diamond's original interpretations, while leaving some intriguing issues open.

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References

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  1. The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, 08544-1003, New Jersey, USA

    Peter R. Grant

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  1. Peter R. Grant
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Grant, P. Competition exposed by knight?. Nature 396, 216–217 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/24267

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