My colleagues are working on feeding preferences of macro symbionts of feather stars. They gathered data on stable isotopes from both sea lilies and its symbionts(shrimps, crabs, ,polychaetes, myzostomida etc). The results are quite surprising and not easy to interpret, so we want to have some reference points. Some people (who work with stable isotopes) advise us, that it might be more useful to collect data on primary consumers (not primary producents) from our area to have such a reference point.
But than we realized, that it is not an easy task to find really specialized primary consumer on the coral reef, as there is little known about food spectrum of most coral reefs inhabitant and many of them are mixotrophic.
Hi Yury,
first of all, it would be important to match the stable isotopes data with gut content info. The primary consumers you are studying are filterfeeders, so they won't we strictly primary consumers. They are filtering POM, and Bacteria too. Therefore, as you indicated, they are all mixotrophic and probably, when you plot C vs N, you get a cloud of all species mixed with the chrinoids. So, this cloud is your base of "primary consumers" perhaps you could try to go upper from there. Like crabs and snails feeding on them and fishes. But, again, only stable isotopes is a weak info. You can match not only with gut content but also diving observations.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Atmospheric Sciences
- Climate Science
- Climate Change