TY - JOUR
T1 - Macroscale patterns in body size of intertidal crustaceans provide insights on climate change effects
AU - Jaramillo, Eduardo
AU - Dugan, Jenifer E.
AU - Hubbard, David M.
AU - Contreras, Heraldo
AU - Duarte, Cristian
AU - Acuña, Emilio
AU - Schoeman, David S.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank Marcia González, Ana María Ojeda and Andrea Bollinger for their assistance during laboratory work and Pedro Rubilar for his helpful advice on the use and review of the outputs of the Akaike Information Criterion analyses. Financial support for field and laboratory work in Chile was provided by CONICYT through Project FONDAP (Oceanografía & Biología Marina, Programa Mayor n° 3). Financial support for analyses and manuscript preparation was provided by Dirección de Investigación y Desarrollo of Universidad Austral de Chile through a travel grant (July 2009) to EJ and for JD by the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER funded by the USA National Science Foundation (Award #s OCE-0620276 and OCE-1232779). The statements, findings, conclusions and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (USA).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2017 Jaramillo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2017/5
Y1 - 2017/5
N2 - Predicting responses of coastal ecosystems to altered sea surface temperatures (SST) associated with global climate change, requires knowledge of demographic responses of individual species. Body size is an excellent metric because it scales strongly with growth and fecundity for many ectotherms. These attributes can underpin demographic as well as community and ecosystem level processes, providing valuable insights for responses of vulnerable coastal ecosystems to changing climate. We investigated contemporary macroscale patterns in body size among widely distributed crustaceans that comprise the majority of intertidal abundance and biomass of sandy beach ecosystems of the eastern Pacific coasts of Chile and California, USA. We focused on ecologically important species representing different tidal zones, trophic guilds and developmental modes, including a highshore macroalga-consuming talitrid amphipod (Orchestoidea tuberculata), two mid-shore scavenging cirolanid isopods (Excirolana braziliensis and E. hirsuticauda), and a low-shore suspension-feeding hippid crab (Emerita analoga) with an amphitropical distribution. Significant latitudinal patterns in body sizes were observed for all species in Chile (21° - 42°S), with similar but steeper patterns in Emerita analoga, in California (32°- 41°N). Sea surface temperature was a strong predictor of body size (-4% to -35% °C-1) in all species. Beach characteristics were subsidiary predictors of body size. Alterations in ocean temperatures of even a few degrees associated with global climate change are likely to affect body sizes of important intertidal ectotherms, with consequences for population demography, life history, community structure, trophic interactions, food-webs, and indirect effects such as ecosystem function. The consistency of results for body size and temperature across species with different life histories, feeding modes, ecological roles, and microhabitats inhabiting a single widespread coastal ecosystem, and for one species, across hemispheres in this space-fortime substitution, suggests predictions of ecosystem responses to thermal effects of climate change may potentially be generalised, with important implications for coastal conservation.
AB - Predicting responses of coastal ecosystems to altered sea surface temperatures (SST) associated with global climate change, requires knowledge of demographic responses of individual species. Body size is an excellent metric because it scales strongly with growth and fecundity for many ectotherms. These attributes can underpin demographic as well as community and ecosystem level processes, providing valuable insights for responses of vulnerable coastal ecosystems to changing climate. We investigated contemporary macroscale patterns in body size among widely distributed crustaceans that comprise the majority of intertidal abundance and biomass of sandy beach ecosystems of the eastern Pacific coasts of Chile and California, USA. We focused on ecologically important species representing different tidal zones, trophic guilds and developmental modes, including a highshore macroalga-consuming talitrid amphipod (Orchestoidea tuberculata), two mid-shore scavenging cirolanid isopods (Excirolana braziliensis and E. hirsuticauda), and a low-shore suspension-feeding hippid crab (Emerita analoga) with an amphitropical distribution. Significant latitudinal patterns in body sizes were observed for all species in Chile (21° - 42°S), with similar but steeper patterns in Emerita analoga, in California (32°- 41°N). Sea surface temperature was a strong predictor of body size (-4% to -35% °C-1) in all species. Beach characteristics were subsidiary predictors of body size. Alterations in ocean temperatures of even a few degrees associated with global climate change are likely to affect body sizes of important intertidal ectotherms, with consequences for population demography, life history, community structure, trophic interactions, food-webs, and indirect effects such as ecosystem function. The consistency of results for body size and temperature across species with different life histories, feeding modes, ecological roles, and microhabitats inhabiting a single widespread coastal ecosystem, and for one species, across hemispheres in this space-fortime substitution, suggests predictions of ecosystem responses to thermal effects of climate change may potentially be generalised, with important implications for coastal conservation.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019016457&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0177116
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0177116
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85019016457
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 12
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 5
M1 - e0177116
ER -