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Marine Biology 4
Ecology of Rocky Beaches
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is the significance of rocky beaches? | They are a common environment found in numerous biogeographical locations that are very vulnerable to human activity making them an excelled ecological laboratory. |
| Where are the rocky beaches in the world? | Everywhere including: America, New Zealand, Brazil, South Africa, Chile and Israel. |
| What do ecologists look at? | Ecology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the interactions between organisms and their environment focusing on factors that affect the distribution and abundance of organisms based on processes and patterns. |
| Individual | The specific organisms in the ecosystem and how it interacts. |
| Population | The group that the specific organism belongs to--all of the members of the species. |
| Community | An assemblage of two or more populations of different species occupying the same geographical area. Communities along the same coast can be composed of similar species but have drastically different structures. |
| Meta Community | A community of ecological communities linked by dispersal of multiple, potentially interacting species. |
| Biodiversity | The variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome or for the entire earth--often used as a measure of health of biological systems. It changes both as a function of time and space. |
| Food Chain on rocky beaches | The predators, the vegetarians, the primary producers |
| Dendropoma rim | A ridge in the rocky shore built by snails and other marine organisms. |
| The rocky beach as an ecological laboratory | There are defined borders, it is easy to manipulate the environment to perform experiments.The rate of succession is relatively high. |
| Keystone Predator | An animal that is important for maintaining species richness (number of species) in a community. Keystone predators feed on different species that normally would compete with each other. |
| Difficult conditions of rocky shores | Breaking waves, exposure to air |
| How do animals stick to rocks? | Sticky substances (chemically), suction (mechanically) |
| How do animals deal with drying out/high temperatures? | Producing mucous, closing their shells |
| Methods of research on the rocky beaches: | Remote sensing, coastal radar, offshore oceanography, onshore monitoring and experiments, ocean currents, subtidal monitoring |
| Thermal stress | The rocky coast organisms are marine organisms that are well adapted to dealing with dryland conditions. |
| What determines an organism's sensitivity to thermal stress? | The organism's physical structure, its size, where it is located on the rock (height, direction, angle of the rock, etc--microniches offer shade and moistness) |
| Heat transport | Heat transport is the net gain or loss of heat. Q is the combination of all of these components. They include: direct solar radiation, long wave emission, convection absorption, dessication and indirect radiation. |
| Mechanisms for dealing with thermal stress | Some animals are sessile while others move around. Mechanisms can be behavioral, structural or biomechanical. |
| Behavioral mechanisms for dealing with thermal stress | Animals occupy habitats in cracks and holes in the rocks, they move to sublittoral areas or they are only active at night. |
| Physical structural solutions to thermal stress | They stick tightly to the surface preventing air from getting into their shells (like some molluscs) while others have an operculum. Also body structure affects the among of radiation that hits the animal. |
| Operculum | A lid on the shell of some gastropods that protects them from environmental conditions. |
| Sea weed adaptations to thermal stress | They have heightened tolerance to drying out during low tide and can reabsorb incredible amounts of water during high tide. |
| Biochemical mechanisms of dealing with thermal stress | Heat-shock proteins fold proteins that have been damaged by excess radiation while ubiquitin takes apart damaged proteins. |
| Heat shock proteins | A class of functionally related proteins whose expression is increased when cells are exposed to elevated temperatures and stress. The increase is transcriptionally regulated. |
| Ubiquitin | A small, highly conserved regulatory protein that is constantly produced in eukaryotes responsible for post translational modification of another protein. If the protein produced is damaged, ubiquitin takes it apart. |
| HSP-70 | Are a family of ubiquitously expressed heat shock proteins. |
| Trade off of thermal stress | Heat leads to protein damage. There is only so much energy available and it can either go to growth and reproduction or it can go to fixing or making new proteins. The balance effects the species distribution whether in the small area or geographically. |
| Effect of the breaking waves | Very damaging--they break and they cause organisms to be released from their substrates. |
| the forces that act on the organism that is trying to stick to its substrate | Tenacity, friction, drag and lift and if they can over come the net force of the wave that is trying to lift them off then they can successfully remain attached to the substrate. |
| Mechanisms of dealing with the breaking waves | Many have flattened bodies, they stick using some kind of mucous, they stick using a vacuum/suction and some are very flexible to take the blows from the waves. |
| Morphology and distribution of species along rocky beaches | They found that the smoother the shell the better it succeeded at surviving in less protected areas. |
| Allometrics | The study of the change in proportion of various parts of an organism as a consequence of growth. |
| Is the division of the habitat connected to the morphology or the allometry and the animal's ability to hold onto the substrate? | One snail that they looked at (of the argamanit and the argamon) had a bigger opening and therefore a greater area with which to hold on to the substrate. |
| How did the scientists test the animals ability to hold on to the substrate? Is the side of the hole really connected? | They used a tenacity measuring device and found that when feeding both species have significantly higher levels of resistance to being pulled off the rocks. It takes more force to pop them off when they're feeding. |
| Byssus threads | Strong silky fibers made from proteins and used by mussels to attach themselves to different substrates. They strings are produced by the byssus gland in the foot. They can be extended and anchored to function in locomotion. |
| Flexibility | Some seaweeds and algae bend with the waves making them less susceptible to the force. |
| Genicula/intergenicula | The small angular knee like structure (between them are the intergenicula) and they allow the organisms to bend instead of break when face with strong waves. |
| Larval recruitment and settlement | Often the adults live on the substrate and the larvae are sent out into open water where they are plankton and then they return the substrate to settle. |
| Larval recruitment | The increase in natural population as progeny grow and immigrants arrive. |
| Supply side ecology | It recognizes the potential role that recruitment plays in the local population dynamics of open systems. The larger the larval pool the greater the recruitment intensity. This, however, leads to prey recruitment and predation intensity. |
| Methods of larva collection | They use plates (for barnacles) and tuffies (for mussels) |
| How do they mention the influence of predation? | Manipulation in the experiments in terms of altering the predator density or in terms of altering the prey density. They also alter the level of exposure of the specimens (fully, fenced, roof, or fence+roof). |
| Findings of a study | Coastal oceanography sets the pace of rocky intertidal community dynamics. The higher recruitment and predation are found on the west coast showing a connection between the amount of prey and the amount of predation. |
| What are the mechanisms? | Differential larval recruitment, differential mortality (predation, physical conditions, and differential competition. They found that predation is high at all sites, probably because of both crabs and fish. |
Created by:
YaelNoa
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