The positive effect of coexisting ecosystem engineers: a unique seaweed-mussel association provides refuge for native mud crabs against a non-indigenous predator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In marine sedimentary bottoms, mussels and macroalgae have long been recognized as important autogenic engineers that create habitat and modify abiotic conditions. The structural complexity added by bivalves and macroalgae may also mediate intraguild predation amongst marine decapod crustaceans. While spatial distributions of these ecosystem engineers frequently overlap, there is limited understanding of compounded effects when more than one engineer is present. Here we demonstrate that the coexistence of two ecosystem engineers may create habitat valuable for the survival of a small native species, the Atlantic mud crab ( Panopeus herbstii ), in the presence of the invasive green crab ( Carcinus maenas ). Using laboratory and field habitat mimics, we measured mud crab survival rates as a proxy for refuge quality. We compared the refuge provided by a unique association between shells of blue mussels ( Mytilus edulis ) and the giant strain of Irish moss ( Chondrus crispus ) to that provided by bare substrate, and by each engineer alone. These experiments revealed that the association of giant Irish moss with blue mussel shells positively and non-additively increased mud crab survival compared to the other less complex habitat mimics. In contrast, parallel experiments revealed that high habitat complexity was less important for young green crabs to survive predation from large conspecifics. These results suggest that the impact of ecosystem engineers on trophic dynamics should be considered in a broader, whole-community context encompassing multiple habitat-forming species present.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".