Persisters and Opportunists in an Assemblage of Coral Reef Starfish

GENERAL INTRODUCTIONCoral reefs seem to defy many of the paradigms which characterise less complex biological communities. While there is general agreement that the biota of coral reefs exhibit high species diversity, some authors have characterised coral reef assemblages by selecting species with high population densities (Sale, 1974; 1976; 1977; 1984; Sale and Dybdahl, 1975; Connell, 1978). Other authors have included rarer species (Kohn, 1959; 1968; Den Boer, 1971; Grassle, 1973) and Endean and Cameron (1990 a) have emphasised the importance of the role of these rarer species and stated that rarity is virtually ignored in most ecological models of the coral reef ecosystem. They suggest that our understanding of coral-reef ecology is influenced strongly by the constraints of many of the analytical tools being used in reef studies. As a result they believe that most analyses have dealt primarily with species that are sufficiently numerous to provide statistically satisfactory numbers of records and that most studies have excluded rare species which, in fact comprise the majority of coral-reef species.