Seawater carbonate chemistry, physiological performance of Semibalanus balanoides and Nucella lapillus, and their predator-prey dynamics.

DOI

While there is increasing evidence for the impacts of climate change at the individual level, much less is known about how species' likely idiosyncratic responses may alter ecological interactions. Here, we demonstrate that ocean acidification and warming not only directly alter species' (individual) physiological performance, but also their predator-prey dynamics. Our results demonstrate that tissue production (used as a proxy for prey quality) in the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides was reduced under scenarios of future climate change, and hence their ability to support energy acquisition for dogwhelk Nucella lapillus through food provision was diminished. However, rather than increasing their feeding rates as a compensatory mechanism, consumption rates of N. lapillus were reduced to the point that they exhibited starvation (a loss of somatic tissue), despite prey resources remaining abundant. The resilience of any marine organism to stressors is fundamentally linked to their ability to obtain and assimilate energy. Therefore, our findings suggest that the cost of living under future climate change may surpass the energy intake from consumption rates, which is likely exacerbated through the bottom-up effects of reduced prey quality. If, as our results suggest, changes in trophic transfer of energy are more common in a warmer, high CO2 world, such alterations to the predator-prey dynamic may have negative consequences for the acquisition of energy in the predator and result in energetic trade-offs. Given the importance of predator-prey interactions in structuring marine communities, future climate change is likely to have major consequences for community composition and the structure and function of ecosystems.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2016) 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 by seacarb is 2017-11-21.

Supplement to: Harvey, Ben P; Moore, Pippa J (2017): Ocean warming and acidification prevent compensatory response in a predator to reduced prey quality. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 563, 111-122

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.883315
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.3354/meps11956
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.883315
Provenance
Creator Harvey, Ben P ORCID logo; Moore, Pippa J ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
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 2670 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-4.092 LON, 52.799 LAT)