Taxonomic aggregation and redundancy in a tropical macroinfaunal assemblage of the southern Caribbean in the detection of temporal patterns

The infaunal soft bottom communities of the southern Caribbean are poorly known, partially due to the scarcity of specialised literature and taxonomic expertise for this region. These assemblages might have structurally redundant genera, so it would be possible to study groups of organisms that present a similar pattern to that of the total community. This redundancy can be reflected at higher taxonomic levels. The abundance of the sublittoral infauna of the southern Caribbean was used in multivariate statistical techniques to describe a temporal pattern. This temporal pattern was related to other patterns obtained from a series of genera subsets that were extracted from the total community. These subsets display close relationships (redundancy). Moreover, the total temporal pattern was compared with those obtained from the emphasis of different taxa and by aggregating their abundances at higher taxonomic levels. There is a high structural redundancy that comprises several groups of characteristic, common and dominant genera. Therefore, by emphasising the contributions of common or combinations of common and intermediate taxa, the family level identification appeared to be a good choice to describe the temporal pattern in this region. These results are useful for temporal pattern descriptions of those assemblages in which a high taxonomic uncertainty exists.