Structural and functional approaches to describe polychaete assemblages: ecological implications for estuarine ecosystems
Wagner F. Magalhães A B and Francisco Barros A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Laboratório de Ecologia Bentônica, Departamento de Zoologia, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Campus Ondina, Salvador, BA 40170-290, Brazil.
B Corresponding author. Present address: Department of Zoology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2538 McCarthy Mall, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822, USA. Email address: wagnerfm@hawaii.edu
Marine and Freshwater Research 62(8) 918-926 https://doi.org/10.1071/MF10277
Submitted: 7 November 2010 Accepted: 22 April 2011 Published: 22 August 2011
Abstract
Polychaete assemblages are of special interest when studying dynamic environments such as estuaries because of their high plasticity in life strategies to cope with environmental variability. We tested the hypothesis that polychaete feeding guilds would be more related to environmental characteristics than to taxonomic composition. Polychaetes were sampled on two different occasions along three tropical estuarine systems in north-eastern Brazil. Different polychaete taxa replaced one another along the entire salinity gradient and the overall pattern from high- to low-salinity regions was from high species and feeding-guild diversities to dominance by a single species or a feeding group. We suggest that the relationships between structure and function of polychaete assemblages might provide a measure of the resilience of estuarine conditions; estuaries with a high redundancy in the trophic role of polychaetes might recover faster from disturbance and retain more natural ecological functions than those estuaries with low or no redundancy, because more species would have the capacity to expand their niches to compensate for the loss of neighbouring species. Integrative approaches allying species composition to their trophic role need to be thoroughly investigated to help understand such complex temporal and spatial organisation of benthic assemblages in estuaries.
Additional keywords: ecosystem resilience, feeding guilds, polychaeta, tropics, zoobenthos.
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