Influence of environmental factors and biogenic habitats on intertidal meiofauna

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of physical and chemical conditions and biotic factors on the distribution and diversity of meiofauna in intertidal zone along a geographical gradient. At 11 sites along the Italian coast, we studied the concurring role of environmental variables, trophic resources and the presence of habitat-forming species (macroalgae vs. mussels) in controlling the meiofaunal communities. The increase of water temperature combined with local thermal conditions was associated with a decrease in nematodes and copepods, with a consequent decrease in meiofaunal abundance towards the south. However, the increase in salinity, as geographical gradient decreases, and local thermal conditions favoured the settlement of a greater number of taxa, influencing communities' composition. The presence of macroalgae or mussels differently influenced the community structure of meiofauna on intertidal substrates and their response to environmental factors. From our results, the presence of macroalgae coverage appeared to reduce the impact of thermal stress on meiofauna and was associated with higher levels of meiofaunal diversity with respect to mussels. This work highlighted the importance of considering the interplay among biotic and abiotic factors, resulting in local combinations of environmental conditions, in order to understand the pattern of diversity and distributions of marine organisms.

Habitat-Diversity Relations between Sessile Macrobenthos and Benthic Copepods in the Rocky Shores of a Marine Protected Area

“…The concept of "ecosystem engineer" was introduced by Jones et al (1994,1997) [4,5] and defined as a group of organisms that may create, modify or maintain habitats (or micro-habitats) by producing physical state changes in biotic and abiotic variables which, either directly or indirectly, control the food availability for other species. Therefore, rocky-shore-forming species, concurring to create variations in the water flow, sedimentation, nutrient fluxes and refuges, may act as ecosystem engineers for inconspicuous organisms such as meiofauna (40-1000 µm body size) [6][7][8][9]. Understanding how such ecosystem engineers may influence the benthic ecosystem functioning might contribute to clarify how these assemblages respond to natural and anthropogenic changes and how the associated ecosystem services might be modified [10,11].…”

“…The structure and dynamics of the hard bottom meiofauna have been mainly investigated in the intertidal zones that are subjected to a wide range of environmental parameters such as temperature, salinity, desiccation, wave exposure (see [8] for review), whereas only very few investigations have been realized in infralittoral rocky shores and especially qualitative/quantitative analyses on copepod assemblages e.g., [6,9,17,26,27]. Furthermore, it seems that the biodiversity of copepods is still largely underestimated even in areas where they were extensively investigated [28,29].…”

Meiofauna associated with vermetid reefs: the role of macroalgae in increasing habitat size and complexity

“…Because meiofaunal communities of the intertidal zone are affected by physical constraints of this zone (e.g. temperature variability, emersion, wave action) (Ape et al 2017), the differences in physical and environmental conditions along the vermetid reefs could influence the distribution of meiofaunal communities, as observed for other organisms (i.e. macrofauna and macroalgae; Safriel and Ben-Eliahu 1991;Mannino 1992;Chemello et al 1998).…”

Benthic meiofauna with emphasis on nematode assemblage response to environmental variation in the intertidal zone of the Danshuei River estuary, northwest Taiwan

“…In our study, as salinity decreased from 6 to 11, the number of genera of nematodes also decreased from station 6 to 11. The increase in salinity favored the settlement of a greater number of nematode taxa, affecting the composition of communities (Ape, Sarà, Airoldi, Mancuso, & Mirto, 2018). The dominances of the genera Anoplostoma , Deontostoma and Metacylicolaimus was negatively correlated with salinity in DRE.…”