Is the IFC hypothesis supported in an animal community?
Background/Question/Methods: Most studies on ecological succession, and many hypotheses for mechanisms of succession, focus on terrestrial plant communities. Many of these hypotheses could also apply to animal communities, but have not been well-tested. We used aquatic macroinvertebrate container communities (primarily larval dipterans) as a model system for investigating succession because of their small size, simple community structure, and potentially rapid turnover of species. To determine whether succession occurs in container systems, we arranged 128 identical water-filled containers in groups of 4 in a forested area. One-fourth of these containers were destructively sampled each week, and the abundances of 6 dipteran taxa were counted for each container. We also tested whether Egler’s hypothesis of initial floristic composition – or for our study, initial faunistic composition (IFC) – could explain changes in community composition. After one week for initial oviposition, we cove
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