Dramatis Personae

Abstract Enumerating the principal actors in Barro Colorado’s ecological theater and characterizing them by suitable thumbnail sketches would be a book in itself-quite a substantial one, like Janzen’s (1983) Costa Rican Natural History. One could easily center an account of the ecology of the rocky weather coasts of Tatoosh Island (Paine and Levin 1981) in the northeastern Pacific on the dynamics and interactions of the principal space occupiers and their consumers. The story of the factors which “zone “ the intertidal, that is to say, which restrict the vertical range of the few principal space occupiers, would provide us with a synoptic account of the rocky intertidal at Tatoosh. Such a story would tell us what limits the kelp Laminaria to the lowermost intertidal and how the starfish Pisaster eats the mussels it can reach, restricting the mussel zone to the upper intertidal (Paine 1974) at all but the most wavebeaten sites, thereby making room for a complex of kelps and coralline algae (Paine 1992) between the mussels and the Laminaria. It would tell us how the crashing waves rolling in from vast expanses of open ocean allow the shrubby, narrow-leaved Lessoniopsis to grow between Laminaria and the mussels at the most exposed sites and how these same waves tear great gaps in exposed angles of the mussel bed, immobilize herbivores, and enable sea palms, Postelsia palmaeformis (Paine 1979) to use the incoming light with extraordinary effectiveness (Leigh et al. 1987, Wing and Patterson 1993), so that these gaps fill with sea palms. It would tell us what governs the succession of organisms that colonize gaps of different sizes torn by winter waves from other sections of the mussel zone (Paine and Levin 1981). Finally, it would tell us what limits the zone of springy, inch-high golden-green turf of Iridaea cornucopiae above the mussels, tenacious but slow to colonize, and the barnacle zone of the uppermost intertidal.