Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 367, Issue 1605, Pages 2971-2978Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0244
Keywords
metabolic rate; body size; consumption rate; global warming; metabolic theory; climate change
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Funding
- German Research Foundation [JA 1726/3-1]
- Cluster of Excellence CliSAP, University of Hamburg through the DFG [EXC177]
- Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology
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Understanding and predicting the consequences of warming for complex ecosystems and indeed individual species remains a major ecological challenge. Here, we investigated the effect of increased seawater temperatures on the metabolic and consumption rates of five distinct marine species. The experimental species reflected different trophic positions within a typical benthic East Atlantic food web, and included a herbivorous gastropod, a scavenging decapod, a predatory echinoderm, a decapod and a benthic-feeding fish. We examined the metabolism-body mass and consumption-body mass scaling for each species, and assessed changes in their consumption efficiencies. Our results indicate that body mass and temperature effects on metabolism were inconsistent across species and that some species were unable to meet metabolic demand at higher temperatures, thus highlighting the vulnerability of individual species to warming. While body size explains a large proportion of the variation in species' physiological responses to warming, it is clear that idiosyncratic species responses, irrespective of body size, complicate predictions of population and ecosystem level response to future scenarios of climate change.
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