Making a virtue out of a necessity: Hurricanes and the resilience of community organization
- Department of Zoology, University of Florida, 223 Bartram Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611-8525
Most of us these days are all too aware of the disruptive impact of hurricanes in human affairs. Yet disturbances ranging from minor local disruptions to massive large-scale catastrophes are part-and-parcel of life in most natural ecosystems (1, 2). These disturbances often provide scientific opportunities, because sometimes one learns the most about how a system functions by watching it recover after it has been kicked by a major disturbance (e.g., ref. 3). Ecologists increasingly recognize that the structure of natural communities reflects the interplay of processes acting over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales (4) that are well beyond the scope of manipulative experiments. The article in this issue of PNAS by Schoener and Spiller (5) provides a deft testament to the insights that can sometimes be gleaned from “natural” experiments generated by large-scale disturbances, which permit an examination of system responses that could not be readily examined with manipulative experiments.
Responses to Disturbance
Schoener and Spiller (5) provide a portrayal of the impact on spider communities of a major hurricane (Floyd) that in 1998 slammed into a suite of 41 Bahamian islands, completely inundating them and driving multiple extinctions. Studies by Schoener, Spiller, and their associates before Hurricane Floyd provide a rich understanding of many aspects of this system and may indeed provide one of the better-understood terrestrial food webs. By comparing data collected from islands for several years before the hurricane, with an equal number of years after the hurricane, Schoener and Spiller (5) characterize key dimensions of community response to this disturbance. Both before and after the hurricane, some islands had lizards, and others did not. Earlier correlative and experimental studies (see references in ref. 5) found that lizards on …
*E-mail: rdholt{at}zoo.ufl.edu
