Coral Reef Herbivorous Fish

Used to illustrate response diversity. The chapter describes a hypothetical coral reef with ten fish species that all eat algae (same function) but with different environmental tolerances: five tolerate warm water but not turbidity, five tolerate turbidity but not warm water. When a storm brings sediment-laden runoff, warm-specialists disappear but turbidity-specialists persist, maintaining total algae consumption. When a heat wave strikes, the reverse occurs. This demonstrates how functional redundancy combined with response diversity maintains ecosystem function despite species loss.