Ecological implications of intertidal mariculture: observed differences in bivalve community structure between farm and reference sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Despite recent growth in shellfish aquaculture in British Columbia, Canada, the impacts of common practices on non‐target species are poorly understood. Two practices employed on clam farms to increase production of the exotic clam Venerupis philippinarum include the addition of juvenile ‘seed’ clams to the sediment and covering seeded clam beds with protective netting, ostensibly to exclude large mobile epibenthic predators. We expected the effects of predator exclusion to be most evident among other bivalves, which made up more than 80% of the infaunal macrobenthos at all sites surveyed. A field study across three regions collected infaunal bivalve density and biomass data. We compared species richness, composition and abundances of communities between clam farms and reference sites, paired on the basis of physical characteristics such as sediment type, slope and aspect. Venerupis philippinarum was the only species found in higher abundance on farm sites in low intertidal areas (227 ± 241·6 clams m −2 , P = 0·02; 872·9 ± 792·9 g m −2 , P = 0·037). Farmed sites showed no difference in mid‐intertidal areas, nor in density of the other 25 bivalve species, although an increase would be expected if netting excluded important predators. Although statistically non‐significant, there were indications that biomass of species other than V. philippinarum may have been lower on farm sites. Bivalve species composition was not significantly different between farm and reference sites. Nevertheless, farm sites were more similar to each other as a group than reference sites, leading to a loss of regional distinctness that was evident among reference sites. Synthesis and applications . Our findings support the hypothesis that predation and competition play minor roles in structuring communities in soft‐bottomed environments. Given the potential for cumulative effects of seeding and netting at large scales, a precautionary approach is recommended in future development of intertidal clam aquaculture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".