Highly Productive Tropical Seagrass Beds Support Diverse Consumers and a Large Organic Carbon Pool in the Sediments

Tropical seagrass beds are productive coastal ecosystems that are important blue carbon sinks and crucial habitats and feeding grounds for consumers at high trophic levels. To understand how energy sustains the ecosystem from seagrass production, we constructed an Ecopath trophic model to reveal the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDiversity (Basel) Vol. 13; no. 11; p. 544
Main Authors Lee, Chen-Lu, Lin, Wei-Jen, Liu, Pi-Jen, Shao, Kwang-Tsao, Lin, Hsing-Juh
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.11.2021
Subjects
Beds (process engineering)
biodiversity
Biomass
blue carbon
Carbon
Carbon sinks
Chelonia mydas
Coastal ecosystems
Consumers
Coral reefs
Detritus
Ecopath
Ecosystems
Energy flow
Eretmochelys imbricata
Fish
Fisheries
Fishing
Food chains
Food sources
Food webs
Herbivores
Mortality
network analysis
Organic carbon
Predation
Predators
Reptiles & amphibians
Respiration
seagrass beds
Seagrasses
Sediments
Sharks
South China Sea
Trophic levels
South China Sea
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Summary:Tropical seagrass beds are productive coastal ecosystems that are important blue carbon sinks and crucial habitats and feeding grounds for consumers at high trophic levels. To understand how energy sustains the ecosystem from seagrass production, we constructed an Ecopath trophic model to reveal the possible pathways of energy flow in the tropical seagrass beds around Dongsha Island, South China Sea. The model indicates that Dongsha seagrass beds were developing but well-structured ecosystems. The productive seagrasses were rarely directly consumed by herbivores and, ultimately, flowed into detrital pools. Detritus was the main food source used to support diverse consumers in the food web. Nevertheless, the low cycling rate (2.74%) suggests that most detritus was not reused or exported and was stored as a large organic carbon pool in the sediments. The detritus-feeding invertebrates are keystone groups in the Dongsha seagrass beds, as they recycle energy from detritus and transfer to top predators such as sharks. The predation of top predators affected the biomasses of other compartments, leading to strong top-down control via a trophic cascade effect.
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ISSN:1424-2818
1424-2818
DOI:10.3390/d13110544