Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of National Academy of Sciences for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107 (2010): 7829-7834, doi:10.1073/pnas.0913187107.
Description:
The planktonic larval stage is a critical component of life history in marine benthic
species because it confers the ability to disperse, potentially connecting remote populations and
leading to colonization of new sites. Larval-mediated connectivity is particularly intriguing in
deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities, where the habitat is patchy, transient and often
separated by tens or hundreds of kilometers. A recent catastrophic eruption at vents near 9°50’N
on the East Pacific Rise created a natural clearance experiment and provided an opportunity to
study larval supply in the absence of local source populations. Previous field observations have
suggested that established vent populations may retain larvae and be largely self-sustaining. If
this hypothesis is correct, the removal of local populations should result in a dramatic change in
the flux, and possibly species composition, of settling larvae. Fortuitously, monitoring of larval
supply and colonization at the site had been established before the eruption and resumed shortly
afterward. We detected a striking change in species composition of larvae and colonists after the
eruption, most notably the appearance of the gastropod Ctenopelta porifera, an immigrant from
possibly 〉300 km away, and the disappearance of a suite of species that formerly had been
prominent. This switch demonstrates that larval supply can change markedly after removal of
local source populations, enabling recolonization via immigrants from distant sites with different
species composition. Population connectivity at this site appears to be temporally variable,
depending not only on stochasticity in larval supply, but also on the presence of resident
populations.
Description:
Support was provided
by NSF grants OCE-969105, OCE-9712233, and OCE-0424953), WHOI grants from DOEI and
the Ocean Venture Fund, a NDSEG graduate fellowship to DA, and the WHOI Jannasch Chair
for Excellence in Oceanography to LM.
Keywords:
Larval dispersal
;
Population connectivity
;
Ctenopelta
;
Lepetodrilus
;
East Pacific Rise
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
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