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Effects of sewage pollution on the structure of rocky shore macroinvertebrate assemblages

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Abstract

The urgency to find efficient indices and indicators to prevent further deterioration of coastal areas is one of the hot topics in today’s scientific publication. However, a detailed knowledge of community responses to anthropogenic impacts is essential to sustain those indices. The studies on the response of benthic community to sewage pollution on intertidal rocky shores are generally based on visual census and do not take into account the tidal levels. In order to fulfil this gap in this study: (i) the sampling was performed by destructive sampling, with all individuals identified to the species level; (ii) the sampling was done at all levels of the intertidal (sublittoral fringe, eulittoral, and littoral fringe). Sewage pollution changed the environmental variables and the abundance of macroinvertebrates, being Mytilus galloprovincialis, Melarhaphe neritoides, and Chthamalus montagui the species most responsible for the dissimilarities observed. Effects were different on the three intertidal zones: community structure changed in the sublittoral fringe; suspension-feeders abundances and species richness increased in the eulittoral; no differences were detected in the littoral fringe. Moreover, the results confirm that the presence of sewage discharges tended to benefit suspension feeders, and that the sensitive species were replaced by opportunistic ones.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the colleagues that helped in the field and laboratory work. This study was supported by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) through a PhD grant attributed to J. Cabral-Oliveira (SFRH/BD/48874/2008), with funds from POPH (Portuguese Operational Human Potential Program), QREN Portugal (Portuguese National Strategic Reference Framework) and MCTES (Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education). The manuscript benefited from the comments and suggestions of three anonymous referees.

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Correspondence to J. Cabral-Oliveira.

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Cabral-Oliveira, J., Mendes, S., Maranhão, P. et al. Effects of sewage pollution on the structure of rocky shore macroinvertebrate assemblages. Hydrobiologia 726, 271–283 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-013-1773-5

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