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As to the processes producing these sorts of patterns, he said
biodiversity scientists broadly saw three: history, and two ecological
processes, disturbance and productivity. Whereas marine biologists in
particular often looked for ecological solutions to problems, the answer lay
often in history and not ecology. When monitoring in the deep sea, it should
not be forgotten that natural patterns could vary from place to place for
reasons now invisible that depended on the history of the area. For
example, deep-sea species counts from the North Atlantic seemed to fit
onto a nice line except for the Norwegian Sea, which was an outlier. He had
spent some time arguing in the press with Rex about what that meant.
There were many potential explanations: history, the fact that the sea was
under ice only 8000 years ago; modern ecology, the odd nature of the
Norwegian Sea, where cold water sank to the bottom and spread out; and
something simple like geography, the peninsular effect that caused the
environment to narrow on a peninsula, producing fewer species. Snakes in
Europe were an example of the geographic effect: there were no snakes in
Ireland, only two species in Britain and many more on the continent.
Lambshead then showed the same data plotted differently, using
the latitudinal gradient approach pioneered by Rex in a paper published a
few years ago in Nature 27 (see chapter 14 above). Where Rex had worked
with molluscs -- one of the best-known groups -- and one or two others,
Lambshead had used nematode data from the North Atlantic. He had not
found the same pattern; in fact, he had obtained almost random variation.
The explanation seemed to be that the North Atlantic, as far as nematodes
were concerned, was not a good place to work because it was divided into a
series of basins, each with its individual ecological character and different
history. When he switched to species count plotted against latitude, a rising
curve appeared, but the Norwegian Sea was still offline. He and Rex were
still arguing about whether an adjustment for depth would destroy the
significance.
In addition to the North Atlantic data, two more sets had been
submitted to journals, from the CCFZ and the Arabian Sea. The Central
Pacific was a better place for this sort of experiment, as it was not divided
into basins and was all at the same depth. For the CCFZ, the data could be
broken into two sets: where there was more productivity, there were more
species. It seemed, certainly for deep-sea nematodes, that if more
productivity were pumped to the abyss, more species would be found. The
data from the Arabian Sea had come from a station at 3400 m that was the
most productive he had ever seen as well as the most diverse. This pattern
was based on just three datasets, and thus was very tentative.
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