Interactive effects of ocean acidification and rising sea temperatures alter predation rate and predator selectivity in reef fish communities

DOI

Ocean warming and acidification are serious threats to marine life. While each stressor alone has been studied in detail, their combined effects on the outcome of ecological interactions are poorly understood. We measured predation rates and predator selectivity of two closely related species of damselfish exposed to a predatory dottyback. We found temperature and CO2 interacted synergistically on overall predation rate, but antagonistically on predator selectivity. Notably, elevated CO2 or temperature alone reversed predator selectivity, but the interaction between the two stressors cancelled selectivity. Routine metabolic rates of the two prey showed strong species differences in tolerance to CO2 and not temperature, but these differences did not correlate with recorded mortality. This highlights the difficulty of linking species-level physiological tolerance to resulting ecological outcomes. This study is the first to document both synergistic and antagonistic effects of elevated CO2 and temperature on a crucial ecological process like predator-prey dynamics.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2015) 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 2015-07-09.

Supplement to: Ferrari, Maud C O; Munday, Philip L; Rummer, Jodie L; McCormick, Mark I; Corkill, Katherine C; Watson, Sue-Ann; Allan, Bridie J M; Meekan, Mark; Chivers, Douglas P (2015): Interactive effects of ocean acidification and rising sea temperatures alter predation rate and predator selectivity in reef fish communities. Global Change Biology, 21(5), 1848-1855

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.848122
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12818
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.848122
Provenance
Creator Ferrari, Maud C O; Munday, Philip L ORCID logo; Rummer, Jodie L ORCID logo; McCormick, Mark I ORCID logo; Corkill, Katherine C; Watson, Sue-Ann ORCID logo; Allan, Bridie J M; Meekan, Mark ORCID logo; Chivers, Douglas P ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2015
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 476 data points
Discipline Earth System Research