Recruitment of the intertidal barnacle Semibalanus balanoides ; metamorphosis and survival from daily to seasonal timescales
Recruitment of the intertidal barnacle Semibalanus balanoides ; metamorphosis and survival from daily to seasonal timescales
Date
2008-09
Authors
Blythe, Jonathan N.
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DOI
10.1575/1912/2700
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Keywords
Benthic animals
Recruitment
Recruitment
Abstract
The benthic habitat is the terminal destination for marine animals in terms of their
reproductive lifecycle. Recruitment dynamics relating to seasonal changes in the benthic
habitat may be the best source of information for predicting recruit abundance and for
marine resources management. The transition from the pelagic to the benthic phases is
the last stage in the connectivity between benthic populations. The transition to the
benthos may be a process that dominates recruitment dynamics to the exclusion of other
characteristics of larvae such as their quality and their density. Recruitment of benthic
marine animals is influenced by two seasonally varying factors of the benthic habitat.
First, the availability of suitable habitat for recruitment can in large part determine the
survival probability for settlers, a trend that is most pronounced for low or no survival
when the settlement substrate is saturated by conspecifics from a recruitment cohort.
Preemption is caused by the presence of current occupants from a recruit cohort, and it
influences the settlement rate or the survival probability of conspecifics. Descriptive
statistics (Chapter 2) and a field experiment (Chapter 4) highlight the role of preemption
on barnacle recruitment. The second factor results from seasonal changes in
environmental conditions that settlers experience in the benthic habitat, which could
affect the physiology and survival probability of barnacle settlers. Highly unpredictable
features of recruitment dynamics also play a role, such as wind that enhances wave action
in the rocky intertidal that has been linked to the rate of settlement. Day to day
variability in wind may cause patterns of settlement to be highly unpredictable. Predator
induced mortality is spatially aggregated, and the random pattern of mortality in space is
highly unpredictable. In contrast to these high frequency sources of recruitment
variability, seasonal factors that vary at lower frequencies and that often change
monotonically lend great predictive ability for recruitment dynamics. It appears that
barnacles have evolved to compete for suitable habitat and have mechanisms to cope with
seasonally varying environmental conditions in the benthic habitat, which may be the
basis for why these features dominate the barnacle recruitment dynamic.
Description
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution September 2008
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Citation
Blythe, J. N. (2008). Recruitment of the intertidal barnacle Semibalanus balanoides ; metamorphosis and survival from daily to seasonal timescales [Doctoral thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution]. Woods Hole Open Access Server. https://doi.org/10.1575/1912/2700