2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference

March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH

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6/08/2017 | 10:00 AM - 10:15 AM | AGGREGATIONS OF MUSSEL AND FISH CONSUMERS INTERACT TO INFLUENCE RESOURCE HETEROGENEITY AND FLUXES IN STREAMS. | 306B

AGGREGATIONS OF MUSSEL AND FISH CONSUMERS INTERACT TO INFLUENCE RESOURCE HETEROGENEITY AND FLUXES IN STREAMS.

Aggregations of consumers can create local patches of nutrient regeneration and material flux (biogeochemical hotspots). Mobile, shorter-lived fishes and localized, longer-lived mussels generate overlapping hotspots in streams. We examined how the interaction of these hotspots influences stream function by sampling resource pools (mussels, fishes, macroinvertebrates, seston, periphyton, nutrients) and fluxes (excretion/egestion rates, nutrient uptake, denitrification/nitrification rates, and nutrient limitation) in river reaches with and without large mussel aggregations. We also conducted a mesocosm experiment where we tested how the presence or absence of a grazing minnow influences ecosystem properties in the presence of mussel beds. To date field studies have shown that mussels alleviate nitrogen limitation and that benthic organic matter is consistently higher in non-mussel reaches. In mesocosms, fish distribute nutrients homogenously, whereas nutrients concentrate downstream of mussel patches where fish are absent. In addition, where mussels and fish overlap, benthic algal standing crops are relatively stable over time and benthic organic matter is lower, whereas algal standing crops fluctuate over time without fish and organic matter is higher. Future work will examine how hydrologic variation influences these interactions.

C11 Community Ecology
C02 Fish and Other Aquatic Vertebrates
C25 Food Webs

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Presenters/Authors

Caryn C. Vaughn (), University of Oklahoma, cvaughn@ou.edu;