Unraveling the relative contribution of inter‐ and intrapopulation functional variability in wild populations of a tadpole species

Functional traits are increasingly recognized as an integrative approach by ecologists to quantify a key facet of biodiversity. And these traits are primarily expressed as species means in previous studies, based on the assumption that the effects of intraspecific variability can be overridden by interspecific variability when studying functional ecology at the community level. However, given that intraspecific variability could also have important effects on community dynamics and ecosystem functioning, empirical studies are needed to investigate the importance of intraspecific variability in functional traits. In this study, 256 Scutiger boulengeri tadpole individuals from four different populations are used to quantify the functional difference between populations within a species, and the relative contribution of inter- and intrapopulation variability in functional traits. Our results demonstrate that these four populations differ significantly in functional attributes (i.e., functional position, functional richness, and low functional overlap), indicating that individuals from different populations within a species should be explicitly accounted for in functional studies. We also find similar relative contribution of inter- (~56%) and intrapopulation (~44%) variation to the total variability between individuals, providing evidence that individuals within populations should also be incorporated in functional studies. Overall, our results support the recent claims that intraspecific variability cannot be ignored, as well as the general idea of "individual level" research in functional ecology.