Multivariate trade-offs, succession, and phenological differentiation in a guild of colonial invertebrates

For competing species limited by one or few resources, diversity is thought to be maintained by trade-offs that allow niche differentiation without resource partitioning. However, few studies have quantified multiple key traits for each species in a guild and shown that trade-offs among these traits apply across the guild. Here we document strong bivariate and multivariate relationships among growth rate, fecundity, longevity, and overgrowth ability for six co-occurring colonial invertebrates. We find that all four of these traits are constrained to a single "fast-slow" niche axis that mechanistically relates life history variation to a colonization-competition trade-off. The location of species on this axis strongly predicts the timing of their peak abundance during succession. We also find that species closer to each other on the fast-slow axis are more likely to differ in reproductive phenology, suggesting a secondary dimension of niche differentiation for otherwise similar species.