Intertidal macrobenthic assemblages associated with monospecific stands of Zostera muelleri, Cymodocea serratula, Halodule uninervis and Halophila ovalis seagrasses are known to display uniform spatial patchiness on the Moreton Bay coast of North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, as do those in Z. capensis in the Knysna estuarine bay, South Africa. Thirty-seven historical datasets of these macrobenthic assemblages were re-analysed to assess variation of local patchiness in each of the 18 most common individual assemblage components at each of these localities in terms of three metrics: overall patchiness (Lloyd's index of patchiness), levels of unoccupancy, and variation in abundance across occupied samples (Lloyd's index of mean crowding). Within-site patchiness was not caused by a restriction of individual species to specific subareas but by variation in their local density, particularly by the extent of unoccupied ‘interstitial’ spaces within patches. Especially in the more uniform Queensland conditions, the more common species occurred relatively widely across the whole locality; individual samples from which a given species was absent never themselves formed patches, the number of such samples conforming to points on truncated normal curves of the frequency of occurrence. Of the 36 species investigated, the two most abundant and widespread both in Queensland and in South Africa displayed significant or near-significant uniformity of levels of local patchiness, whilst five showed significantly uniform mean crowding and ten significantly uniform unoccupancy. This is the first demonstration that some species may display a characteristic level of patchiness in a given habitat type.

中文翻译：

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在给定的栖息地类型中，物种是否表现出特有的种内斑块？潮间带海草大型底栖动物案例

众所周知，与 Zostera muelleri、Cymodocea serratula、Halodule uninervis 和 Halophila Ovalis 海草的单种群相关的潮间带大型底栖动物群落，在昆士兰州北斯特拉布鲁克岛的摩顿湾海岸显示出均匀的空间斑块，就像在 Knysna estua 的 Z. capensis 中的群落一样海湾，南非。重新分析了这些大型底栖生物群落的 37 个历史数据集，以根据三个指标评估每个地点 18 个最常见个体群落成分的局部斑块状变化：总体斑块状（劳埃德斑块状指数）、水平占用样本的空置率和丰度变化（劳埃德平均拥挤指数）。场地内的斑驳不是由于单个物种对特定子区域的限制，而是由于它们局部密度的变化，特别是由于斑块内未被占用的“间隙”空间的范围。尤其是在昆士兰更均匀的条件下，更常见的物种在整个地区相对广泛地出现；不存在给定物种的个体样本本身从未形成斑块，此类样本的数量符合发生频率的截断正态曲线上的点。在调查的 36 个物种中，昆士兰和南非最丰富和分布最广的两个物种显示出显着或接近显着的局部斑块均匀度，而五个显示出显着均匀的平均拥挤度和十个显着均匀的空置。