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Feeding ecology of shallow water meiofauna: insights from a stable isotope tracer experiment in Potter Cove, King George Island, Antarctica

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Abstract

Antarctic meiofauna is still strongly understudied, and so is its trophic position in the food web. Primary producers, such as phytoplankton, and bacteria may represent important food sources for shallow water metazoans, and the role of meiobenthos in the benthic-pelagic coupling represents an important brick for food web understanding. In a laboratory, feeding experiment 13C-labeled freeze-dried diatoms (Thalassiosira weissflogii) and bacteria were added to retrieved cores from Potter Cove (15-m depth, November 2007) in order to investigate the uptake of 3 main meiofauna taxa: nematodes, copepods and cumaceans. In the surface sediment layers, nematodes showed no real difference in uptake of both food sources. This outcome was supported by the natural δ13C values and the community genus composition. In the first centimeter layer, the dominant genus was Daptonema which is known to be opportunistic, feeding on both bacteria and diatoms. Copepods and cumaceans on the other hand appeared to feed more on diatoms than on bacteria. This may point at a better adaptation to input of primary production from the water column. On the other hand, the overall carbon uptake of the given food sources was quite low for all taxa, indicating that likely other food sources might be of relevance for these meiobenthic organisms. Further studies are needed in order to better quantify the carbon requirements of these organisms.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the ESF IMCOAST project (Impact of climate induced glacial melting on marine coastal systems in the Western Antarctic Peninsula region, www.imcoast.org) and the SDD-BIANZO (Biodiversity of three representative groups of the Antarctic Zoobenthos: coping with change) project (Belgian science policy) for financial support. The first author financed through an IWT PhD scholarship. The second author was a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO-Flanders, Belgium) at the time of the experiment and is now financed by the Ghent University (BOF-GOA 01GA1911 W). We also thank the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany) and the Instituto Antartico Argentino for providing the logistics at Dallmann laboratory in Jubany station. A special thank goes to Prof. Doris Abele for her precious assistance during the setup of the experiment. Last, but not least, we would like to thank Dr. Nicole Aberle-Malzahn and Dr. Evangelia Gontikaki for their valuable help given in revising the present work.

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Pasotti, F., De Troch, M., Raes, M. et al. Feeding ecology of shallow water meiofauna: insights from a stable isotope tracer experiment in Potter Cove, King George Island, Antarctica. Polar Biol 35, 1629–1640 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-012-1203-6

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