SPATIAL VARIATION PATTERNS IN THE MARINE MACROALGAXIPHOPHORA GLADIATASSP. GLADIATA (PHAEOPHYTA). I. PARTITIONING OF MORPHOLOGICAL CARIATION INTO SPATIAL SCALES1

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Abstract
The geographic expression of morphological variation inxiphophora gladiatassp.gladiatawas examined throughout the range of the taxon. The spatial scales on which this variation occurred were identified using nested analyses of variance (ANOVA) on 14 morphometric characters from 1224 plants collected at 12 sites. These characters were remarkably homogeneous in the scales at which their variation was expressed. The greater part of the morphological variation inX. gladiatassp.gladiata(over 90% for most characters was expressed between adjacent primary clumps; that is, over scales of about 100 mm. Since it was previously shown that the clumps of plants are themselves spatially discrete, the spatial expression of morphology in this taxon forms a true mosaic with abrupt between‐cells boundaries. Much of the remaining variation in most characters was expressed at a scale of about 300 km. At intermediate scales, that is, over a few meters and (in most characters) a few kilometers, there appears to be negative additional variance. In effect, the mixture of clumps at these scales tends to be a uniform rather than a random selection of the available morphological variety of clumps within each region. This observed pattern is compared and contrasted with those previously found in the confamilial speciesFucus distichusandF. evanescens.