Ecophysiology of Ectothermic Ecosystem Engineers: Bioenergetic Effects of Climate and Food on Dominant Consumers and Their Consequences for Coastal Ecosystems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This body of work explores dynamics of temperate marine grazers that are sensitive to food availability and inhabit regions with dramatic contemporary variation in abiotic conditions due to nearshore upwelling. Climate change projections indicate that such environmental fluctuation in these systems will increase in both intensity and variability in the coming decades. Chapter 1 focuses on the temperate red sea urchin Mesocentrotus franciscanus, which can denude highly productive kelp forests through their voracious grazing, often resulting in the formation of barren habitats which can persist for decades. In this chapter I first used respirometry to demonstrate how red sea urchins from wild populations depress their metabolism in barrens relative to kelp forests in the Pacific North West (PNW) \cite{Spindel2021Ecology}. Then I conducted a laboratory feeding experiment which provided evidence that metabolic depression and gonadal biomass reduction in red sea urchins are coupled with food deprivation, but that this response is highly plastic and was not accompanied by differences in feeding rate or assimilation efficiency. Additionally, Chapter 1 provides empirical validation for the use of fatty acid based dietary tracers for inferring algal diets in M. franciscanus. Chapter 2 builds upon these insights by applying the use of gonadal and fatty acid biomarkers in situ to trace the transfer of newly available algal food resources to key forest consumers, M. franciscanus and the endangered northern abalone, Haliotis kamtschatkana in the context of a collaborative ecological restoration project in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada.This chapter also includes the development of a granular library of kelp forest dietary resources based on multivariate fatty acid biomarker profiles. Chapter 3 investigates the impacts of contemporary ocean acidification and marine heatwaves on rates of herbivory and energetics in the dominant ecosystem engineer, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus using a manipulative mesocosm experiment. Ecological consequences of food and climatic impacts on individual herbivory and energetics are discussed. Collectively, these chapters will demonstrate the importance of considering intraspecific variability and heterogeneity of food availability in understanding and forecasting effects of dynamic abiotic drivers in marine ectotherms.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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".