What it is
Drawing on 146 time series spanning about 25 years (1999 to 2023) from six long-term monitoring programs across coral reefs, mangrove creeks, seagrass beds, and kelp forests, and representing roughly 1.5 million individual fishes, the authors estimated the temporal stability of nitrogen supply by marine fish communities. Across ecosystems, species richness strongly and positively predicted the stability of consumer-mediated nutrient dynamics, consistent with diversity-stability theory. Within ecosystems, however, richness was not the dominant driver: species asynchrony (variation in biomass fluctuations among species) was the strongest and most consistent predictor, with higher synchrony destabilizing the nutrient dynamics.
Why it matters
Decades of biodiversity-stability research have focused on primary producers, leaving open whether consumer diversity similarly buffers the nutrient flows that animals drive, something that had rarely been quantified. By extending the theory to consumers and identifying species asynchrony (not just richness) as the strongest stabilizer, the work sharpens what to protect for stable marine nutrient cycling as global change degrades and defaunates ecosystems.
Underlined numbers link to their source. Every metric and quoted figure is listed under Sources and data below.
Filed underIsotope Analysis in Ecology, Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies, Marine and coastal ecosystems