Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Inter-Research, 2005. This article is posted here by permission of Inter-Research for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Marine Ecology Progress Series 302 (2005): 177-185, doi:10.3354/meps302177.
Description:
We evaluated the spatial variability in barnacle settlement at scales of 10s to 100s of meters (among-sites: 300 m; within-site: 30 m) along 1 km of coastline in the Bay of Todos Santos, northern Baja California, Mexico. Settlement of the intertidal barnacles Chthamalus spp. was monitored daily from April 1 to May 10, 2002, and thereafter every other day to September 18, 2002. Concurrently, temperature of the water column was measured every 15 min, and hourly wind speed and direction data were acquired from a nearby site. We identified 12 settlement pulses during our study, with all but 2 pulses showing significant differences in mean settlement at either or both spatial scales. Despite a high variability in numbers, settlement pulses were synchronous between sites. The occurrence of settlement pulses was significantly correlated with a rapid increase in the stratification of nearshore waters, but not correlated with sudden fluctuations in the direction of winds perpendicular to the shore. Sudden changes in the stratification of nearshore waters have been associated with the occurrence of internal tidal bores. Our results suggest that internal motions, more specifically internal tidal bores, could be an important mechanism for the onshore transport of larvae in the Bay of Todos Santos.
Description:
Research was supported in part by
AMELIS Project J37689/V from CONACYT and UC MEXUS
grants to L.B.L., F.T. and J.P., and the wind measurements
were partially supported by the US National Science Foundation.
Keywords:
Synchronous settlement
;
Spatial variability
;
Intertidal barnacle
;
Chthamalus
;
Baja California
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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