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Seston Quality and Available Food: Importance in the Benthic Biogeochemical Cycles

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Marine Animal Forests

Abstract

Seston refers to the organisms (bioseston) and nonliving matter (abioseston) swimming or floating in a water body. Bioseston includes plankton as well as nekton. The abioseston comprises mainly detritus as well as minerals. A classical approach is to correlate sedimentary organics to quantitative benthic fauna characteristics. This poses two main problems: (a) finding the most appropriate unit to assess organics in the sediment and (b) the nutritional process is complex encompassing ingestion, absorption, and assimilation and thus cannot be assessed linearly. For example, selectivity is associated to ingestion, but not everything ingested is digested and absorbed by the consumers, and incorporation is dependent on meeting specific nutritional requirements. Fate of particulate organic matter (POM) is influenced by benthic fauna through nutrition and bioturbation, and in turn POM influences benthic faunal biomass, reproductive output and abundance, making relationships between seston and benthic fauna bidirectional.

As nutrition results from processes which do not affect the whole sedimentary POM pool, there is little hope of linking benthic secondary production and biomass to bulk descriptors. This makes essential to identify and use more specific biochemical parameters. Quality of seston can be assessed through total organic matter, organic carbon, nitrogen content, total and available proteins (TPRT and APRT), carbohydrates, lipids, and total and enzymatically hydrolysable (available) amino acids (THAA and EHAA, respectively). Parameters such as digestibility and composition are key to understand seston nutritional value. So far, available amino acids and lipids have been shown to be the best descriptors of food nutritional value and they are associated to the most labile fraction of particular organic matter.

Suspension feeders and other sessile and vagile organisms have adapted their feeding strategies to use both biotic and abiotic seston. These organisms compose a highly diverse benthic community, regardless of their original food source being similar or not. In this chapter, the relationship of animal forest components (benthos filter feeders) and seston quantity and quality are described and their relationships explored. Organisms may adapt to changes in seston though storage and then consumption at times of low seston presence. Notably, a lot of organisms change their activity either by feeding on different prey or by constraining activity to highly nutritious times. A clear example of the latter is the coupling between phytodetritus pulses and reproductive activity observed in many benthic communities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Geociencias, Universidad de los Andes, Carrera Primera #18A-12, Bogotá, Colombia

    Carme Huguet

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  1. Carme Huguet
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Correspondence to Carme Huguet .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Sergio Rossi

  2. Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, CNRS, Laboratoire d’Ecogéochimie des Environnements Benthiques (LECOB) Observatoire Océanologique, Banyuls/Mer, France

    Lorenzo Bramanti

  3. Departament d’Ecologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Andrea Gori

  4. Instituto Español de Oceanografía, Centro Oceanográfico de Baleares, Palma, Mallorca, Spain

    Covadonga Orejas

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Huguet, C. (2017). Seston Quality and Available Food: Importance in the Benthic Biogeochemical Cycles. In: Rossi, S., Bramanti, L., Gori, A., Orejas , C. (eds) Marine Animal Forests. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21012-4_22

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