10.5061/DRYAD.Q573N5TMF
Bryant, Sara River
0000-0002-1712-6158
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
McClain, Craig
Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium
Energetic constraints on body-size niches in a resource-limited marine
environment
Dryad
dataset
2022
Body size
energy
niche dynamics
mollusks
FOS: Biological sciences
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
https://ror.org/01x8rc503
University Fellowship
2022-06-02T00:00:00Z
2022-06-02T00:00:00Z
en
359593 bytes
3
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Body size of life on Earth spans many orders of magnitude, and with it
scales the energetic requirements of organisms. Thus, changes in
environmental energy should impact community body-size distributions in
predictable ways by reshaping ecological and niche dynamics. We examine
how carbon, oxygen, and temperature, three energetic drivers, impact
community size-based assembly in deep-sea bivalves. We demonstrate that
body-size distributions are influenced by multiple energetic constraints.
Relaxation in these constraints leads to an expansion of body-size niche
space through the addition of novel large size classes, increasing the
standard deviation and mean of the body-size distribution. With continued
Anthropogenic increases in temperature and reductions in carbon
availability and oxygen in most ocean basins, our results point to
possible radical shifts in invertebrate body size with the potential to
impact ecosystem function.