Seawater carbonate chemistry and wild cleaner fish behaviour

DOI

Ocean acidification is considered to affect fish behaviour through the disruption of GABAergic neurotransmission in controlled laboratory conditions, but less is known of the GABAergic role on fish behavioural performance in the wild. Most coral reef fishes engage in complex cleaning interactions, where they benefit from ectoparasite removal and stress relief. Here, we tested whether potential ocean acidification impairment of wild cleaning interactions, between the cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus and its clients, can be explained by the GABAAR model. We used, the GABAA receptor agonist (muscimol) and antagonist (gabazine) for the first time in the wild and tested their effects on cleaning behaviour in Moorea Island (French Polynesia) to address natural interactions and recovery capacity. After exposure to expected ocean acidification conditions, the proportion of time spent advertising cleaning services, a measure of motivation to interact, dropped significantly relative to controls. Furthermore, the GABAergic antagonist gabazine recovered most CO2-induced behavioural alterations to control levels, consistent with the GABAAR model of altered Cl− flux in ocean acidification-exposed fish. However, muscimol treatment only produced the same behavioural alterations found with CO2 exposure in time spent advertising cleaning. Our results support the evidence that ocean acidification alters some components of cleaning behaviour through GABAA receptor modulation with potential cascading effects on coral reef health and structure.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2022) 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 2023-03-20.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.956816
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.11.003
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13473156
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/index.html
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.956816
Provenance
Creator Paula, José Ricardo ORCID logo; Cascalheira, Ligia; Oliveira, Raul ORCID logo; Otjacques, Eve ORCID logo; Frazao-Santos, Catarina; Beldade, Ricardo ORCID logo; Mills, Suzanne ORCID logo; Rosa, Rui ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2023
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 2393 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (149.833 LON, -17.533 LAT)