Feeding biology of a habitat-forming antipatharian in the Azores Archipelago
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Feeding biology of a habitat-forming antipatharian in the Azores Archipelago M. Rakka1,2 • C. Orejas3 • S. R. Maier4 • D. Van Oevelen4 • A. Godinho1,2 M. Bilan1,2 • M. Carreiro-Silva1,2
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Received: 2 December 2019 / Accepted: 15 July 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Benthic suspension feeders have developed a variety of feeding strategies and food availability has often proven to be a key factor explaining their occurrence and distribution. The feeding biology of coral species has been the target of an increasing number of studies, however most of them focus on Scleractinia and Octocorallia, while information for Antipatharia is very scarce. The present study focused on Antipathella wollastoni, a common habitatforming antipatharian in the Azores Archipelago, forming dense black coral forests between 20 and 150 m. The objective of the study was to investigate the food preferences of the target species upon availability of different isotopically enriched food substrates and determine its ability to capture zooplankton prey under different flow speeds. The species was able to utilize different food sources including live phytoplankton, live zooplankton and dissolved organic Topic Editor Mark R. Patterson
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00338-020-01980-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & M. Rakka [email protected] 1
IMAR - Instituto do Mar, University of the Azores, Rua Frederico Machado 4, 9901-862 Horta, Portugal
2
OKEANOS Research Unit, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of the Azores, 9901-862 Horta, Portugal
3
Group of Ecosystems Oceanography (GRECO), Instituto Espan˜ol de Oceanografı´a, Centro Oceanogra´fico de Baleares, Moll de Ponent s/n, 07015 Palma, Spain
4
Department of Estuarine and Delta Systems, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ-Yerseke) and Utrecht University, Yerseke, The Netherlands
matter (DOM), indicating the ability to exploit seasonally available food sources. However, ingestion of zooplankton enhanced carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) incorporation in coral tissue and metabolic activity, highlighting the importance of zooplankton prey for vital physiological processes such as growth and reproduction. Maximum zooplankton capture rates occurred under 4 cm-1, however the species displayed high capacity to capture zooplankton prey over different flow rates highlighting the ability of A. wollastoni to exploit high quantities of shortly available prey. Keywords Benthic suspension feeders Capture rates Flow Atlantic Black corals Ecophysiology
Introduction Corals are key components of sublittoral ecosystems not only in tropical (Spalding et al. 2001) but also in temperate and cold ecosystems (Bo et al. 2014; Buhl-Mortensen et al. 2018; Orejas and Jime´nez 2017). They can be encountered over a wide bathymetric range including the euphotic, mesophotic and aphotic zone, where they build communities that ha
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