Abstract
The contribution of fish communities to organic matter (OM) fluxes, especially between salt marshes and adjacent marine coastal waters are reviewed. For this a data set from the bay of Mont Saint-Michel and literature is examined and discussed. In a range of macro-tidal coasts of Europe, salt marshes are only flooded at spring tides for a short time. Many animals, including fish, then invade the salt marshes through tidal creeks. They forage there for up to a few hours and swim back to sea at ebb. Meanwhile, organic matter is exported as gut content. In the 4000 ha of salt marshes of the bay of Mont Saint-Michel mullets were responsible for the export of about 8 kg of dry weight OM ha−1 in 1996 and of roughly 12 kg in 1997. Although spatio-temporally variable, the fish communities appear to play a more or less significant role, as ‘biotic vectors’ in the nutrient fluxes between salt marshes and coastal waters.
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Lefeuvre, JC., Laffaille, P. & Feunteun, E. Do fish communities function as biotic vectors of organic matter between salt marshes and marine coastal waters?. Aquatic Ecology 33, 293–299 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009956605842
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009956605842