Regeneration of Mnemiopsis leidyi under different food quantities

DOI

Many marine invertebrates including ctenophores are capable of extensive body regeneration when injured. However, as for the invasive ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, there is a constant subportion of individuals not undergoing whole body regeneration but forming functionally stable half-animals instead. Yet, the driving factors of this phenomenon have not been addressed so far. This study sheds new light on how differences in food availability affect self-repair choice and regeneration success in cydippid larvae of M. leidyi. As expected, high food availability favored whole-body regeneration. However, under low food conditions half-animals became the preferential self-repair mode. Remarkably, both regenerating and half-animals showed very similar survival chances under respective food quantities. As a consequence of impaired food uptake after injury, degeneration of the digestive system would often occur indicating limited energy storage capacities. Taken together, this indicates that half-animals may represent an alternative energy-saving trajectory which implies self-repair plasticity as an adaptive trade-off between high regeneration costs and low energy storage capacities. We conclude that self-repair plasticity could lead to higher population fitness of ctenophores under adverse conditions such as in ships' ballast water tanks which is postulated to be the major vector source for the species' spreading around the globe.

Data on health status of uncut larvae (group 1 and group 3) limited because they were assessed by different inspector.

Supplement to: Bading, Katharina Tissy; Kaehlert, Sarah; Chi, Xupeng; Jaspers, Cornelia; Martindale, Mark Q; Javidpour, Jamileh (2017): Food availability drives plastic self-repair response in a basal metazoan- case study on the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi A. Agassiz 1865. Scientific Reports, 7(1)

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.874073
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16346-w
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.874073
Provenance
Creator Bading, Katharina Tissy; Kaehlert, Sarah; Chi, Xupeng ORCID logo; Jaspers, Cornelia ORCID logo; Martindale, Mark Q ORCID logo; Javidpour, Jamileh ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2017
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 10152 data points
Discipline Earth System Research