Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2005, Page 71

COPROPHILOUS FUNGI FROM THE FAROE ISLANDS
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Sample pair No. of species on Species common to both Similarity coefficient
sheep hare Jaccard Sørensen
33/34 7 2 2 0.29 0.44
36/37 10 13 6 0.35 0.52
38/39 11 12 4 0.21 0.35
42/43 20 16 7 0.24 0.39
44/45 17 11 5 0.22 0.36
46/47 15 14 5 0.21 0.34
48/49 17 11 6 0.27 0.43
Mean 13.9 11.3 5.0 0.26 0.40
S.E. 1.75 1.69 0.62 0.020 0.024
Pooled data from all 7 samples 41 31 20 0.38 0.56
Table 2. Coefficients of similarity of species assemblages from paired samples of sheep and hare dung
no. of species observed in x samples) can
be used to estimate the number of spe-
cies to be expected from 50 samples, for
comparison with estimates for the number
to be expected for that latitude. The simi-
larity of the mycobiota from pairs of hare
and sheep samples collected from eight
different localities were compared by us-
ing the Jaccard and Sørensen coeffícients
(Magurran, 2003).
Results and discussion
The twenty samples provided a total of
233 records of 59 species. Many of these
are new records for the Faroe Islands. The
equation for the cumulative species curve
was y = 10.345x°-563, which provides
an estimate of 94 species of the relevant
groups to be expected from 50 samples.
This value is of a similar order to, but
slightly lower than, those found for simi-
lar collections of samples from similar or
slightly lower latitudes, e.g. Iceland (Ri-
chardson, 2004) and the UK (Richardson,
2001).
In comparing the mycobiota from the
pairs of hare and sheep samples, one hare
collection comprised only two pellets,
which yielded two species. It was consid-
ered that this small sample would not pro-
vide a representative comparison with the
mycobiota of the contrasting sheep sam-
ple, so that sample pair was omitted from
the comparison of similarity of the sheep
and hare samples. Analysis of the records
from the other seven pairs, each collected
from a different locality, showed no signif-
icant difference in the number of species
occurring on individual sheep and hare
samples (mean 13.9 vs 11.3 per sample,
p = 0.11, 6 d.f.). Overall the seven sheep
samples yielded 41 species compared to 31
from hare. The community composition of
the sheep and hare pellet mycobiotas were
significantly different (Tables 2, 3). The
Jaccard and Sørensen indices, of 0.26 and