Abstract
AbstractClimate change imposes unusual long‐term trends in environmental conditions, plus some tremendous shifts in short‐term environmental variability, exerting additional stress on marine ecosystems. This paper describes an empirical method that aims to improve our understanding of the performance of benthic filter feeders experiencing changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, on time scales of minutes to hours, especially during daily cycles or extreme events such as marine heatwaves or hypoxic upwelling. We describe the Fluorometer and Oximeter equipped Flow‐through Setup (FOFS), experimental design, and methodological protocols to evaluate the flood of data, enabling researchers to monitor important energy budget traits, including filtration and respiration of benthic filter‐feeders in response to fine‐tuned environmental variability. FOFS allows online recording of deviations in chlorophyll and dissolved oxygen concentrations induced by the study organism. Transparent data processing through Python scripts provides the possibility to adjust procedures to needs when working in different environmental contexts (e.g., temperature vs. pH, salinity, oxygen, biological cues) and with different filter‐feeding species. We successfully demonstrate the functionality of the method through recording responses of Baltic Sea blue mussels (Mytilus) during one‐day thermal cycles. This method practically provides a tool to help researchers exposing organisms to environmental variability for some weeks or months, to relate the observed long‐term performance responses to short‐term energy budget responses, and to explain their findings with the potential to generalize patterns. The method, therefore, allows a more detailed description of stress‐response relationships and the detection of species' tolerance limits.
Highlights
The two most important energy budget traits of benthic filterfeeders, filtration, and respiration rates can be monitored through flow-through setups (Riisgård 2001; Filgueira et al 2006; Bayne 2017)
High-temporal resolution recording of filtration and respiration responses in parallel was only described by Haure et al (2003) who used a flow-through setup equipped with a laboratory fluorometer and an oximeter in a short (3 h) experiment
We describe the design of our setup in conjunction with the protocols used for semiautomated data processing
Summary
To advance our empirical understanding of organisms’ performance in a changing ocean, developing experimental setups for high-temporal resolution monitoring of organisms’ energetics traits in dynamic environments and automated data processing is crucial. Widdows (1973) measured filtration or respiration of mussels under constant temperatures based on weekly snapshot-measurements of phytoplanktonic food and dissolved oxygen concentrations in water flowing into and out of an experimental chamber using an oximeter and a Coulter counter. High-temporal resolution (continuous) recording of filtration and respiration responses in parallel was only described by Haure et al (2003) who used a flow-through setup equipped with a laboratory fluorometer and an oximeter in a short (3 h) experiment. It is technically challenging to record the responses of filterfeeders exposed to environmental fluctuations in an air- and water-tight flow-through setup, as time, temperature, and other physical and chemical factors can confound measurements
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