Metabolic Rate Characteristics and Sediment Cleaning Potential of the Tropical Sea Cucumber <i>Holothuria scabra </i>

Abstract

The oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and ammonium excretion rate (AER) of a tropical sea cucumber, Holothuria scabra, were determined in laboratory experiments. OCR and AER exhibited a significant negative correlation to body weight (BW), expressed as a power function of BW: OCR = 0.09 × BW −0.58 (mgO 2 /g/h, r 2 =0.89, n=15) and AER = 0.38 × BW −0.19 (μmolN/g/h, r 2 =0.54, n=15). These values were comparable to those in previous studies on other sea cucumber species. The OCR of shrimp tank sediment was reduced to less than half (4.5 ± 0.3 to 1.0 ± 0.1 mgO 2 /gdry/h) by the ingestion and excretion process of H. scabra. Acid volatile sulfide (AVS-S) concentration was also decreased to less than half (0.67 to 0.31 mgS/mgdry); despite the low reduction rates of organic carbon and nitrogen contents (0.19 to 0.14 mgC/mgdry and 0.022 to 0.019 mgN/mgdry, respectively). These results suggest that components in the sediment with high oxygen consumption potential were removed by H. scabra. These findings also provide fundamental information with which to evaluate the quantitative role of H. scabra in polyculture with shrimp.

Metabolic rates are significantly lower in abyssal Holothuroidea than in shallow-water Holothuroidea

“…Shallow-water holothurian metabolic rate increases with increasing mass assuming a power function (solid line: R TN = 0.5436 • M 0.5858 ; F 1,36 = 103.000, p < 0.001, r 2 = 0.741). Data from [13,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41].…”

“…A further 22 additional holothurian metabolic rates from 10 species were identified from the literature. Once mean metabolic rate was determined for size categories for each species, 33 additional holothurian metabolic rate data were added to the 26 metabolic rates reported by Hughes et al [10], increasing the number of species with reported metabolic rates from 17 to 35 [10,13,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][56][57][58][59].…”

“…Metabolic rate data were normalized to a temperature of 2.5°C using a shallow-water-holothurian-derived Q 10 of 2.12, and to a standard total wet mass (M) of 70 g using a shallow-water-holothurian-derived mass-scaling coefficient of 0.5858. Blue circles represent shallow-water data (from [13,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]), black circles represent deep-sea data (from [10,13,[56][57][58][59]) and open circles represent data from this study. .…”

Sandfish (Holothuria scabra) as potential reservoir of white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) when co-cultured with black tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon)

“…The study suggested that H. scabra is capable of degrading the organic matter in prawn ponds and can bioremediate pond sediment (Kodama et al 2015).…”

Effect of live-storage period and temperature on oxygen consumption rate in the cold-water sea cucumber Parastichopus tremulus

“…A third possible passage for gases and fluids is through the madreporite which in sea cucumbers is located inside the coelom (Gao and Yang, 2015, chapter 4). In addition to exhibiting an allometric relationship with body size (Astall and Jones, 1991;Kodama et al, 2015), a range of factors are known to affect the metabolic rate and thereby oxygen consumption rate (OCR) in echinoderms, e.g. salinity (Talbot and Lawrence, 2002), pH (Farmanfarmaian, 1966), partial pressure of oxygen, pO 2 (Shick, 1983;Spicer, 1995;Christensen and Colacino, 2000), seasonal variation in growth (Lawrence and Lane, 1982;Fraser et al, 2004), feeding status (Vahl,1984;Brockington and Clarke, 2001;Idrisi et al, 2003;Yu et al, 2020), nutritional quality of food (Otero-Villanueva et al, 2004) and reproductive state (Giese et al, 1966;Feŕal and Magniez, 1988;Ru et al, 2020).…”