Patterns and Processes in Reef Fish Diversity

At large geographical scales, biogeographers have suggested that variation in species richness results from factors such as area, temperature, environmental stability, and geological processes, among many others. From the species pools generated by these large-scale processes, community ecologists have suggested that local-scale assembly of communities is achieved through processes such as competition, predation, recruitment, disturbances and immigration. The authors analyze the hypotheses on speciation and dispersal for reef fish from the Indian and Pacific oceans and show how dispersal from a major center of origination can simultaneously account for both large-scale gradients in species richness and the structure of local communities.