Key prey indicates high resilience on marine soft bottom habitats

Abstract

The key prey was determined based on the diet and spatial patterns of the Nektonic community in southern Brazil. The proposed tool to discriminate key prey was based on simple probabilistic methods and analytical procedures that integrate freely available software on the web. To avoid using arbitrary criteria in key prey determination it was used an indicator based on an adapted outlier analysis including a run of principal component analysis (PCA) and then the choice of prey that fall out of the 99% concentration ellipse. The results showed three key prey identified at species level: the shrimp Artemesia longinaris in the coastal habitats and euphausid Euphausia similis and anchovy Engraulis anchoita in the continental shelf habitats (warm and cold). The analysis of the diets of the indicator species of three necktonic assemblages showed that all of them had both pelagic and detritus as primary sources of energy. However, in shallow coastal waters prevailed access to benthic food web key prey. In deeper areas, the Warm shelf assemblage accessed more evenly the epifauna, infauna and the pelagic compartments, while the Cold shelf assemblage was more dependent on planktonic production and had a prevalence of pelagic key prey. Is demonstrated the importance of the identification of key prey, since it may indicate greater or lesser stability of predator populations depending on whether they come from compartments with more or less dynamic primary production processes, including climate-related changes that may affect the predator prey interactions. This study confirmed the prediction that demersal nekton has high disturbance recovery capacity, which may mask for decades the growing impact of fishing.