Abstract
Many marine invertebrates including ctenophores are capable of extensive body regeneration when injured. However, as for the invasive ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, there is a constant subportion of individuals not undergoing whole body regeneration but forming functionally stable half-animals instead. Yet, the driving factors of this phenomenon have not been addressed so far. This study sheds new light on how differences in food availability affect self-repair choice and regeneration success in cydippid larvae of M. leidyi. As expected, high food availability favored whole-body regeneration. However, under low food conditions half-animals became the preferential self-repair mode. Remarkably, both regenerating and half-animals showed very similar survival chances under respective food quantities. As a consequence of impaired food uptake after injury, degeneration of the digestive system would often occur indicating limited energy storage capacities. Taken together, this indicates that half-animals may represent an alternative energy-saving trajectory which implies self-repair plasticity as an adaptive trade-off between high regeneration costs and low energy storage capacities. We conclude that self-repair plasticity could lead to higher population fitness of ctenophores under adverse conditions such as in ships’ ballast water tanks which is postulated to be the major vector source for the species’ spreading around the globe.
Highlights
Regeneration, the ability to replace missing body parts, is broadly but unevenly distributed across metazoans and is a likely result of multiple gains and losses throughout evolutionary history[1,2,3,4]
We aimed to investigate the role of food availability for causing plasticity in self-repair and overall regeneration success in cydippid larvae of M. leidyi
We showed that the preferential self-repair response in bisected cydippid larvae of M. leidyi varies under different prey quantity regimes
Summary
Regeneration, the ability to replace missing body parts, is broadly but unevenly distributed across metazoans and is a likely result of multiple gains and losses throughout evolutionary history[1,2,3,4]. The most likely vector for invasion is the transport in ballast water of ships[15] Both the tentaculate larval and lobate adult life stage of M. leidyi readily regenerate and are capable of whole-body regeneration from only a body quadrant or half[13,16]. A definition for functional half-animals is that they only possess half the number of original body structures, i.e. one tentacle and four comb rows as well as an apical organ. They can feed, grow and undergo the normal life cycle including reproduction[13].
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