Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
© The Author(s), 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in PeerJ 3 (2015): e999, doi:10.7717/peerj.999.
Description:
Marine seafloor ecosystems, and efforts to restore them, depend critically on the influx and settlement of larvae following their pelagic dispersal period. Larval dispersal and settlement patterns are driven by a combination of physical oceanography and behavioral responses of larvae to a suite of sensory cues both in the water column and at settlement sites. There is growing evidence that the biological and physical sounds associated with adult habitats (i.e., the “soundscape”) influence larval settlement and habitat selection; however, the significance of acoustic cues is rarely tested. Here we show in a field experiment that the free-swimming larvae of an estuarine invertebrate, the eastern oyster, respond to the addition of replayed habitat-related sounds. Oyster larval recruitment was significantly higher on larval collectors exposed to oyster reef sounds compared to no-sound controls. These results provide the first field evidence that soundscape cues may attract the larval settlers of a reef-building estuarine invertebrate.
Description:
Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (Grants OCE-1234688 & ISO-1210292). Additional support for experimental materials came from a PADI Foundation Grant (#5145) and a National Shellfisheries Association Melbourne R. Carriker Student Research Grant to AL.
Keywords:
Acoustic cues
;
Reef ecology
;
Larval recruitment
;
Soundscape ecology
;
Oyster
;
Crassostrea virginica
;
Settlement cue
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
Format:
application/vnd.ms-excel
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