Аннотация:The major conclusion of this paper is that larger refuges or islands generally will preserve more species than a series of small refuges of equivalent total area. The claim of Simberloff and Abele (1976) that several small refuges may contain more species than a single large refuge is valid only for islands which contain a very small fragment of the total available species pool. Such areas are inappropriate as permanent wildlife refuges. A system of small tracts of land, such as a series of small urban parks, may be designed specifically to preserve only a small fraction of the total fauna in each park, but a large diversity among parks. Two small islands may contain more species than a single island of equivalent area as the result of one or both of two effects: (1) a sampling phenomenon or (2) a faunal exchange with a "mainland" source pool. Both effects are reduced with increasing island size and as a result of realistic assumptions about the relative colonizing abilities of species. Arguments presented in this paper suggest that the results obtained by Simberloff and Abele are not the result of taxonomic idiosyncracy of arthropods; rather, their findings reflect the fact that the archipelago they studied contained only a small fraction of the total mangrove arthropod fauna.
