John Bruno1, Esteban Agudo-Adriani1, Nicole Chico-Ortiz2, Isabel Silva-Romero1
1The University of North Carolina, USA - 2Galapagos Science Center, Ecuador
Ecological response diversity to pulse or press perturbations is the diversity of responses among species in a functional group. Communities with a greater response diversity are thought to be more resilient to disturbance and environmental change. The purpose of this study was to quantify the response diversity of marine predators to ocean warming. We performed a series of laboratory experiments to measure the temperature-dependence of respiration and consumption of four invertebrate carnivores, (the whelks Vasula melones, Tribulus planospira, and Hexaplex princeps, and the sea star Heliaster cumingi). Vasula was fed two snail prey (Engina pirostoma and Columbella haemastoma) and the latter three predators were fed the barnacle Megabalanus peninsularis. All experimental species inhabit shallow rocky reefs of the Galápagos. Our results indicate that these four carnivore species have different thermal niches in temperatures ranging from 22 to 32ºC. This likely facilitates temporal niche partitioning across seasons and the ENSO cycle, enabling coexistence among these species and potentially with others that depend on the same prey resources. These results suggest that a high level of temperature response diversity for predation could help maintain this critical function in a variable and changing environment.
Biography
John Bruno is a marine ecologist and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. John grew up surfing, fishing, and SCUBA diving in south Florida. He came to UNC in 2001 after a post doc at Cornell University, and a PhD at Brown University where he worked on the ecology of coastal plant communities. His research is focused on marine biodiversity, particularly the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems.