Increasingly intense heatwaves 🌡️can cause phase shifts from coral to algae 🪸➡️🌱 !
Dead coral allows algae to gain a foothold and take over !
led by @kkopecky711 @mixotrophe et al , funded: @BioOce @MooreaCoralReef @USLTER https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.4006
How well does variation in metabolism predict variation in predation?
Our new paper provides a rare look at how individual metabolism is linked to individual predation rates across a range of temperatures!
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.931319/full
#metabolictheory #ecology #predation
A huge proportion of the world’s population resides in urban areas along the coast. As cities expand, the ability of coastal ecosystems to provide the benefits people derive from nature, ranging from food from fisheries to coastal defense to maritime transportation and beyond, is in question. While it is well understood that coastal development changes ecosystems, quantitative insights about how terrestrial urbanization fundamentally alters ecosystem structure and function in adjacent freshwater and downstream coastal marine habitats remain rare, though a general expectation is that impacts of terrestrial urbanization will attenuate from land to freshwater to coastal marine habitats. Empirical assessments of these phenomena are especially important for species that rely on freshwater and coastal marine habitats at multiple points in their life cycles, including endangered and threatened Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.). We investigated associations between landscape-scale urbanization and ecosystem structure (biodiversity of epibenthic invertebrate taxa) and function (benthic net primary productivity and decomposition) in freshwater and coastal marine habitats across six pairs of more and less urbanized, coastal watersheds in Puget Sound, WA, USA, using principal components analysis, analysis of covariance, and Mantel tests. Greater upland urbanization was associated with greater reductions in freshwater biodiversity, measured as the density and evenness of epibenthic in...
Check out our new paper examining how temperature alters the physiology and feeding of one of California's most valuable species - the CA spiny lobster!
Article: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2023.1072807/full
Blog: https://www.marinebiology4all.com/blog/california-spiny-lobster
Funded by @OPC_California @BioOce @LterSbc
IntroductionChanges in temperature can fundamentally transform how species interact, causing wholesale shifts in ecosystem dynamics and stability. Yet we still have a limited understanding of how temperature-dependence in physiology drives temperature-dependence in species-interactions. For predator-prey interactions, theory predicts that increases in temperature drive increases in metabolism and that animals respond to this increased energy expenditure by ramping up their food consumption to meet their metabolic demand. However, if consumption does not increase as rapidly with temperature as metabolism, increases in temperature can ultimately cause a reduction in consumer fitness and biomass via starvation.MethodsHere we test the hypothesis that increases in temperature cause more rapid increases in metabolism than increases in consumption using the California spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) as a model system. We acclimated individual lobsters to temperatures they experience sacross their biogeographic range (11, 16, 21, or 26°C), then measured whether lobster consumption rates are able to meet the increased metabolic demands of rising temperatures.Results and discussionWe show positive effects of temperature on metabolism and predation, but in contrast to our hypothesis, rising temperature caused lobster consumption rates to increase at a faster rate than increases in metabolic demand, suggesting that for the mid-range of temperatures, lobsters are capable of rampi...
Do you want to know how predators disrupt or actually benefit mutualisms? Our new paper led by
@mixotrophe
w/ me and Roger Nisbet out now in
@ESAEcosphere
and funded by
@BioOce
Article: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.4382
Blog Summary:https://www.marinebiology4all.com/blog/do-predators-always-reduce-the-benefits-of-mutualists
Fisheries monitoring is essential for the sustainable management of marine resources. By applying the value of information, resource managers can make informed decisions about how to allocate limited resources for monitoring. This can help to ensure that the benefits of monitoring outweigh the costs