Abstract
Biological invasions result in negative and unpredictable impacts on oceans worldwide. Non-indigenous macrophytes often synthesize secondary metabolites for defensive purposes and increased competition efficiency: this is the case of Caulerpa cylindracea, which has entered the Mediterranean Sea in 1990 and competed against local flora and fauna since. It was demonstrated that the white seabream Diplodus sargus (i) has included the algae into its diet, (ii) is subject to the peculiar Abnormally Tough Specimen (ATS) condition post-cooking, and (iii) suffers physiological and behavioral disturbances from caulerpin, one of the three major algal secondary metabolites. This paper confirms a feeding relationship between the fish and the algae, quantifies caulerpin accumulation in the liver, suggests a possible mollusk- and echinoderm-driven biomagnification, and highlights the fact that all ATS specimens were males. Multivariate analyses on a multi-biomarker panel reveals differential correlations to key cellular processes such as oxidative stress, metabolism, neurotoxicity, and lipid peroxidation as well as to condition indexes.
Highlights
The introduction of non-indigenous species has greatly increased in recent decades (Roques et al, 2016; Seebens et al, 2017)
Exotic species are provided with a higher chemical uniqueness than non-invasive/native counterparts (Cappuccino and Arnason, 2006 and references therein), and these molecules were demonstrated to bioaccumulate (Baležentiene, 2015) and biomagnificate (Costa et al, 2017) along the food web
Hierarchical cluster analysis with the group average cluster mode and a non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination (MDS) with 50 restarts were generated using a Bray–Curtis resemblance similarity matrix to display the grouping of samples and represent the samples in a low-dimensional space
Summary
The introduction of non-indigenous species has greatly increased in recent decades (Roques et al, 2016; Seebens et al, 2017). The increasing awareness depends on the fact that such an issue reflects on multiple levels, i.e., evolutionary, ecological, economic, and social (Sax et al, 2007; Azzurro et al, 2019). Exotic species are provided with a higher chemical uniqueness than non-invasive/native counterparts (Cappuccino and Arnason, 2006 and references therein), and these molecules were demonstrated to bioaccumulate (Baležentiene, 2015) and biomagnificate (Costa et al, 2017) along the food web. The actual long-term extent of the damage of such metabolites on key biological/physiological features such as feeding, behavioral, and reproductive habits may be underestimated at the ecosystem level (Langkilde et al, 2017)
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