The bivalves Amarilladesma mactroides and Donax hanleyanus as bioindicators of the impact of vehicles on Cassino Beach, southern Brazil

Abstract

Sandy beaches are the main recreational ecosystems of the world, enabling high ecological impacts, especially on the benthic macrofauna, which inhabit the sandy matrix and have a low capacity of locomotion. Cassino Beach, located in southern Brazil, has intense vehicle traffi c during the summer, so the purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of vehicles on the key species Amarilladesma mactroides and Donax hanleyanus. For this purpose, samplings were performed in three sectors of this beach (High Impact, Moderate Impact and Control) during six periods of the year. The results showed lower densities of both bivalves in the High Impact sector than in to the other sectors in all periods, except in fi rst summer sampling, and a predominance of recruits throughout the study. Thus, it suggests that the two species were infl uenced by the intense vehicle traffi c, especially in the most impacted sector. In this way, we conclude that these bivalves could be used as good indicators of pulse disturbance by vehicle traffi c on this beach and the results can support in management plans regarding the use of Cassino Beach, considering ecological aspects of this ecosystem in addition to economic and cultural demands.

The science we need for the beaches we want: frontiers of the flourishing Brazilian ecological sandy beach research

“…Brazilian beaches have been jeopardized by oil spills (Marques et al, 2017;Sills et al, 2020;da Rosa, 2022), sewage discharges (Roth et al, 2016), marine litter (Neves et al, 2022), overfishing (Bender et al, 2014), chemical contamination (Cabrini et al, 2017;Cabrini et al, 2018;Ragagnin and Turra, 2022), trampling and vehicles traffic (Bom and Colling, 2020;Santos et al, 2021b;Bom and Colling, 2022;Santos et al, 2022) and coastal urbanization (Reĝo et al, 2018;Corte et al, 2022;Laurino et al, 2022;Shah Esmaeili et al, 2022). Furthermore, researchers have shown that urbanization may increase parasitism in invertebrates and fishes Amaral et al (2016) and Fanini et al (2020) combined into the four broad topics, and considerations on the advances (or lack of) in each of these areas during the previous decade.…”