Ocean acidification affects growth but not nutritional quality of the seaweed Fucus vesiculosus (Phaeophyceae, Fucales)
By L. Gutow, Mohammed Mofizur Rahman, K. Bartl, R. Saborowski, I. Bartsch, C. Wiencke. 2014
94 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding the ecological implications of global climate change requires investigations of not only the direct effects of environmental change on species performance but also indirect effects that arise from altered species interactions. We performed CO2 perturbation experiments to investigate the effects of ocean acidification on the trophic interaction between the brown seaweed Fucus vesiculosus and the herbivorous isopod Idotea baltica. We predicted faster growth of F. vesiculosus at elevated CO2-concentrations and higher carbon content of the algal tissue. We expected that I. baltica has different consumption rates on algae that have been grown at different CO2 levels and that the isopods remove surplus carbon metabolically by enhanced respiration. Surprisingly, growth of F. vesiculosus as well as the C:N-ratio of the algal tissue were reduced at high CO2-levels. The changes in the elemental composition had no effect on the consumption rates and the respiration of the herbivores. An additional experiment showed that consumption of F. vesiculosus by the isopod Idotea emarginata was independent of ocean acidification and temperature. Our results could not reveal any effects of ocean acidification on the per capita strength of the trophic interaction between F. vesiculosus and its consumers. However, reduced growth of the algae at high CO2-concentrations might reduce the capability of the seaweed to compensate losses due to intense herbivory.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5352f7b0c4a4120ce3836d6b5015becba2a654b
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Citations in the corpus
- Macroalgae may mitigate ocean acidification effects on mussel calcification by increasing pH and its fluctuations (2018, background): “…eutrophication in many coastal areas (but see Andersen et al. 2017 for recent signs of trend reversal in the Baltic Sea) fertilize macroalgae (Gutow et al. 2014; Graiff et al. 2015a,b), increase the biomass to water ratio at a local scale and, thus, benefit calcifiers (but see Britton et al.…”