Trend,signal and noise in the ecology of Ostracoda: information from rare species in low-diversity assemblages

Samples of Ostracoda from nearshore marine environments, where the water is more likely to be brackish or hypersaline, typically have low species diversity and are dominated by such species as Cyprideis torosa. In high-diversity samples from normal-marine environments, rare species are likely to contribute to environmental noise. Evaluation of low-diversity samples from Lake Manzala, Egypt, however, shows that the environmental signal provided by rare species can be masked by the overwhelmingly dominant species, C. torosa. In such instances, the dominant species should be removed from the data set and studies based on a large sample of the rare species.