Exploring the interplay of biotic interactions and salinity stress in freshwater invertebrate assemblages: reply to Chessman (2022)
Ben J. Kefford
A * , Jon P. Bray A B , Susan J. Nichols A , Jollene Reich A , Ralph Mac Nally A C , Andrew O’Reilly-Nugent A , Guillaume Kon Kam King D and Ross Thompson A
A Centre for Applied Water Science, Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia.
B Gisborne District Council, Gisborne, New Zealand.
C School of Biosciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic. 3052, Australia.
D Mathématique et Informatique Appliquées, du Génome à l’Environnement (MaIAGE), Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement (INRAE), Université Paris-Saclay, Jouy-en-Josas, France.
Marine and Freshwater Research 73(5) 585-587 https://doi.org/10.1071/MF22043
Submitted: 16 February 2022 Accepted: 25 February 2022 Published: 7 April 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing.
Abstract
The most parsimonious interpretation of our experimental findings (Bray 2019; Kefford 2022) is that the effect of experimental increases in salinity on stream macroinvertebrate communities, was altered by organisms from a high-salinity site. This interpretation is consistent with long-established and widely accepted ecological and ecotoxicological theory. The suggestion (Chessman 2022) that the initial community was confounded, that it converged within the first week of the experiment and then diverged again, is neither parsimonious nor explicable by theory. All experiments are imperfect, yet we maintain that our experiment is informative, and we encourage other researchers to generate new data to inform on the degree to which abiotic and biotic effects of salinity, and other abiotic stressors, affect ecological communities.
Keywords: biotic interactions, experimental design, major ions, mesocosm experiments, realised niche, salinity, stream invertebrates.
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