Publication Date:
2020-06-25
Description:
Understanding and predicting the consequences of warming for complex ecosystems and indeed
individual species remains a major ecological challenge. Here, we investigated the effect of increased
seawater temperatures on the metabolic and consumption rates of five distinct marine species. The
experimental species reflected different trophic positions within a typical benthic East Atlantic food
web, and included a herbivorous gastropod, a scavenging decapod, a predatory echinoderm, a decapod
and a benthic-feeding fish. We examined the metabolism–body mass and consumption–body
mass scaling for each species, and assessed changes in their consumption efficiencies. Our results
indicate that body mass and temperature effects on metabolism were inconsistent across species
and that some species were unable to meet metabolic demand at higher temperatures, thus highlighting
the vulnerability of individual species to warming. While body size explains a large
proportion of the variation in species’ physiological responses to warming, it is clear that idiosyncratic
species responses, irrespective of body size, complicate predictions of population and
ecosystem level response to future scenarios of climate change.
Repository Name:
EPIC Alfred Wegener Institut
Type:
Article
,
isiRev
Format:
application/pdf
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