Isotopic incorporation rates and discrimination factors in mantis shrimp crustaceans.

Maya S Devries,Tate S Tunstall,Todd E Dawson,Carlos Martínez Del Rio,David P Gillikin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0122334

Maya S Devries, Tate S Tunstall + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122334

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Abstract

Stable isotope analysis has provided insights into the trophic ecology of a wide diversity of animals. Knowledge about isotopic incorporation rates and isotopic discrimination between the consumer and its diet for different tissue types is essential for interpreting stable isotope data, but these parameters remain understudied in many animal taxa and particularly in aquatic invertebrates. We performed a 292-day diet shift experiment on 92 individuals of the predatory mantis shrimp, Neogonodactylus bredini, to quantify carbon and nitrogen incorporation rates and isotope discrimination factors in muscle and hemolymph tissues. Average isotopic discrimination factors between mantis shrimp muscle and the new diet were 3.0 ± 0.6 ‰ and 0.9 ± 0.3 ‰ for carbon and nitrogen, respectively, which is contrary to what is seen in many other animals (e.g. C and N discrimination is generally 0–1 ‰ and 3–4 ‰, respectively). Surprisingly, the average residence time of nitrogen in hemolymph (28.9 ± 8.3 days) was over 8 times longer than that of carbon (3.4 ± 1.4 days). In muscle, the average residence times of carbon and nitrogen were of the same magnitude (89.3 ± 44.4 and 72.8 ± 18.8 days, respectively). We compared the mantis shrimps’ incorporation rates, along with rates from four other invertebrate taxa from the literature, to those predicted by an allometric equation relating carbon incorporation rate to body mass that was developed for teleost fishes and sharks. The rate of carbon incorporation into muscle was consistent with rates predicted by this equation. Our findings provide new insight into isotopic discrimination factors and incorporation rates in invertebrates with the former showing a different trend than what is commonly observed in other animals.

Highlights

Mantis shrimp (Stomatopoda) are marine crustaceans with highly specialized feeding morphology that produces among the fastest and most powerful strikes in the animal kingdom [1,2]
We found a small but significant difference between the lipid extracted and untreated treated muscle aliquots for δ15N in T. funebralis
There were no significant differences between the isotopic compositions of the treated and untreated muscle tissues in N. bredini (δ13C: MD ± s.e. = 0.1 ± 0.3 ‰, paired t-test: p = 0.30, t43 = 0.49, n = 44; δ15N: MD ± s.e. = 0.1 ± 0.3 ‰, paired t-test: p = 0.75, t42 = 0.32, n = 43) and for δ13C in T. funebralis (MD ± s.e. = 0.0 ± 0.1 ‰, paired t-test: p = 0.70, t9 = -0.40, n = 10)

Summary

Introduction

Mantis shrimp (Stomatopoda) are marine crustaceans with highly specialized feeding morphology that produces among the fastest and most powerful strikes in the animal kingdom [1,2]. Isotopic compositions of different prey items have been shown to record a predator’s diet with reliable fidelity when prey are consumed, metabolized, and assimilated into a consumer’s tissues (reviewed in [8]). Another important benefit of stable isotope analysis is that, unlike traditional methods that only document a snap-shot of a predator’s diet, stable isotope analysis can reconstruct diet assimilated over various time windows [9,10,11]. Growth is the dominant determinant of isotopic turnover in rapidly growing organisms, whereas replacement of catabolized tissue represents the main contribution to turnover in non-growing animals [20,21]

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