Seawater carbonate chemistry and mussel respiration and calcification rates

DOI

Marine habitat‐forming species often play critical roles on rocky shores by ameliorating stressful conditions for associated organisms. Such ecosystem engineers provide structure and shelter, for example, by creating refuges from thermal and desiccation stresses at low tide. Less explored is the potential for habitat formers to alter interstitial seawater chemistry during their submergence. Here, we quantify the capacity for dense assemblages of the California mussel, Mytilus californianus, to change seawater chemistry (dissolved O2, pH, and total alkalinity) within the interiors of mussel beds at high tide via respiration and calcification. We established a living mussel bed within a laboratory flow tank and measured vertical pH and oxygen gradients within and above the mussel bed over a range of water velocities. We documented decreases of up to 0.1 pH and 25 μmol O2/kg internal to the bed, along with declines of 100 μmol/kg in alkalinity, when external flows were  95% of the time. Reductions in pH and O2 inside mussel beds may negatively impact resident organisms and exacerbate parallel human‐induced perturbations to ocean chemistry while potentially selecting for improved tolerance to altered chemistry conditions.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2019) 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 2020-05-6.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.915978
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1002/lno.11258
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.915978
Provenance
Creator Ninokawa, Aaron ORCID logo; Takeshita, Yuichiro ORCID logo; Jellison, Brittany M ORCID logo; Jurgens, Laura J; Gaylord, B
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2020
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 774 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-123.072 LON, 38.318 LAT)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2017-02-02T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2017-02-13T00:00:00Z