
salpa is often generalist consumers not only dictated by diet nutrient content but by complex interactions between other traits of nutritional quality, habitat heterogeneity within their ample foraging area, and responses to predation risk.ĭetermination of toxic metals, trace and essentials, and macronutrients in Sarpa salpa and Chelon labrosus: risk assessment for the consumers.Īfonso, Aridani Gutiérrez, Angel J Lozano, Gonzalo González-Weller, Dailos Rubio, Carmen Caballero, José M Hardisson, Arturo Revert, Consueloĭue to increased environmental pollution, monitoring of contaminants in the environment and marine organisms is a fundamental tool for assessing the existence of risk from their consumption to human health. In concert, this and other studies suggest S. salpa with no clear selectivity for seagrass with higher nutrient content. These results add to a recent body of work reporting a broad generalist feeding behavior by S. Food choice experiments did not show strong evidence for selectivity of enriched leaves. Consumption was not higher on fertilized than on non-fertilized leaves.

salpa observed around the plots, leaf consumption was generally low in the plots examined. Despite the duration of leaf exposure to herbivores (30 days) and abundant schools of S. These responses included quantification of leaf consumption in fertilized and non-fertilized/control plots within the bed, and food choice assays where fertilized and non-fertilized/control leaves were simultaneously offered to the herbivore. salpa, and examined the response by the herbivore. To contribute to this debate, we conducted a field fertilization experiment where we enriched leaves of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica, a staple diet for S. However recent findings have questioned this notion and shown that herbivores do not preferentially feed on macrophytes with higher nutrient contents, but rather feed on a wide variety of them with no apparent selectivity. salpa herbivory, with the fish feeding more intensively and exerting greater top down control on macrophytes with higher internal nutrient contents. Past research has suggested nutritional quality of their diet influences S.

Through direct and indirect mechanisms, this herbivore can exert significant control on the structure and functional dynamics of seagrass beds and macroalgae. The fish Sarpa salpa (L.) is one of the main macroherbivores in the western Mediterranean. Marco-Méndez, Candela Wessel, Caitlin Scheffel, Whitney Ferrero-Vicente, Luis Fernández-Torquemada, Yolanda Cebrián, Just Heck, Kenneth L Sánchez-Lizaso, Jose Luis

Lack of Impact of Posidonia oceanica Leaf Nutrient Enrichment on Sarpa salpa Herbivory: Additional Evidence for the Generalist Consumer Behavior of This Cornerstone Mediterranean Herbivore.
