Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Mullineaux, L. S., Mills, S. W., Le Bris, N., Beaulieu, S. E., Sievert, S. M., & Dykman, L. N. Prolonged recovery time after eruptive disturbance of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent community. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287(1941), (2020): 20202070, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.2070.
Description:
Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are associated with seafloor tectonic and magmatic activity, and the communities living there are subject to disturbance. Eruptions can be frequent and catastrophic, raising questions about how these communities persist and maintain regional biodiversity. Prior studies of frequently disturbed vents have led to suggestions that faunal recovery can occur within 2–4 years. We use an unprecedented long-term (11-year) series of colonization data following a catastrophic 2006 seafloor eruption on the East Pacific Rise to show that faunal successional changes continue beyond a decade following the disturbance. Species composition at nine months post-eruption was conspicuously different than the pre-eruption ‘baseline' state, which had been characterized in 1998 (85 months after disturbance by the previous 1991 eruption). By 96 months post-eruption, species composition was approaching the pre-eruption state, but continued to change up through to the end of our measurements at 135 months, indicating that the ‘baseline' state was not a climax community. The strong variation observed in species composition across environmental gradients and successional stages highlights the importance of long-term, distributed sampling in order to understand the consequences of disturbance for maintenance of a diverse regional species pool. This perspective is critical for characterizing the resilience of vent species to both natural disturbance and human impacts such as deep-sea mining.
Description:
Support was provided by NSF grant nos. OCE-1356738, DEB-1558904 and OCE-1829773 to L.S.M., and NSF grant nos. OCE-0452333, OCE-1136727, OCE-1131095, and OCE-1559198 to S.M.S. Support from Ifremer ‘Geobiology of Extreme Environment', EU ITN SENSENET no. 237868, CNRS INEE, and Fondation Total was provided to N.L.B., and from the French Oceanographic Research Fleet, CNRS and Sorbonne University for the MESCAL cruise (doi:10.17600/12010020).
Keywords:
hydrothermal vent
;
disturbance
;
resilience
;
succession
;
colonization
;
seafloor eruption
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
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