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stutchbutyi, at Wirroa island, New Zealand, based on their size, feeding mode and
mobility. However, studies carried out at the same location by Legendre et al. (1997)
revealed that the larger-scale patterns (10m to several 100m) of these two species were
largely created by physical variables and that biotic effects were undetectable. They
proposed that the reason for the disparity between the results from their study and the
one by Hewitt et al. (1996) was due to scale differences.
The study described here was not explicitly aimed at determining the processes
responsible for any spatial patterns observed. The results from other studies, for
example Hewitt et al. (1996) and Legendre et al. (1997), suggest that patchiness at the
smaller scale investigated in this study (1-2m2) may have been generated by biological
processes while those at larger scales (tens of metres to a hundred metres) may have
resulted from physical processes. Patches between 1-2m 2 exhibited by species in the
present study on Drum Sands did not appear to be spatially correlated with each other
which suggests that they may have been generated either by negative interspecific or
positive intraspecific interactions. Hewitt et al. (1996) showed that it was possible to
infer processes from small-scale (