Ocean acidification affects growth but not nutritional quality of the seaweed Fucus vesiculosus (Phaeophyceae, Fucales)

DOI

Understanding the ecological implications of global climate change requires investigations of not only the direct effects of environmental change on species performance but also indirect effects that arise from altered species interactions. We performed CO2 perturbation experiments to investigate the effects of ocean acidification on the trophic interaction between the brown seaweed Fucus vesiculosus and the herbivorous isopod Idotea baltica. We predicted faster growth of F. vesiculosus at elevated CO2-concentrations and higher carbon content of the algal tissue. We expected that I. baltica has different consumption rates on algae that have been grown at different CO2 levels and that the isopods remove surplus carbon metabolically by enhanced respiration. Surprisingly, growth of F. vesiculosus as well as the C:N-ratio of the algal tissue were reduced at high CO2-levels. The changes in the elemental composition had no effect on the consumption rates and the respiration of the herbivores. An additional experiment showed that consumption of F. vesiculosus by the isopod Idotea emarginata was independent of ocean acidification and temperature. Our results could not reveal any effects of ocean acidification on the per capita strength of the trophic interaction between F. vesiculosus and its consumers. However, reduced growth of the algae at high CO2-concentrations might reduce the capability of the seaweed to compensate losses due to intense herbivory.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Lavigne et al, 2014) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation is 2014-08-28.

Supplement to: Gutow, Lars; Rahman, Mohammed Mofizur; Bartl, Kevin; Saborowski, Reinhard; Bartsch, Inka; Wiencke, Christian (2014): Ocean acidification affects growth but not nutritional quality of the seaweed Fucus vesiculosus (Phaeophyceae, Fucales). Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 453, 84-90

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.835334
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jembe.2014.01.005
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/package=seacarb
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.835334
Provenance
Creator Gutow, Lars ORCID logo; Rahman, Mohammed Mofizur; Bartl, Kevin; Saborowski, Reinhard ORCID logo; Bartsch, Inka ORCID logo; Wiencke, Christian
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2014
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Supplementary Dataset; Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 8024 data points
Discipline Earth System Research