Differential coping capacities underlie the overall resistance of temperate seagrasses to herbivory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Grazing can impart long‐lasting changes in vegetated ecosystems. How ecosystems respond to herbivory depends on the ecological and evolutionary histories of their foundational species. The overall ecosystem functioning and associated biodiversity depend on these responses but there is still little understanding on how the intensity and duration of herbivory interact and impact vegetated ecosystems. We experimentally tested in the field the responses of three seagrass species with distinct life history traits to increasing intensities of herbivory over time. Specifically, we assessed structural responses (i.e., canopy height and shoot density) to reflect the ecosystem state. Additionally, we used mechanistic models to assess induced and constitutive responses in the different seagrass species. Results show that seagrasses coped with herbivory differentially in relation to their life history traits. Posidonia oceanica (persistent species) was resistant and only registered declines in canopy height, whereas both canopy heigh and shoot density rapidly decreased for Cymodocea nodosa (intermediate‐colonizing species) and Zostera noltei (colonizing species). Seagrasses also differed in the type of structural response, with the colonizing species experiencing reductions in shoot density, and the persistent P. oceanica registering declines in canopy height. After months of exposure to cumulative herbivory, all three species showed signs of stability. Interestingly, none of the species disappeared completely even when exposed to extreme herbivory. Mechanistic models indicate that herbivory‐induced responses are a potential explanation for these patterns. This study suggests that given the long evolutionary history of herbivory, some seagrasses may be remarkably well adapted to both intense and cumulative herbivory.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".