RT journal article
T1 Importance of the chemical defenses and sugars in the feeding preference of Paracentrotus lividus over two sympatric template seagrass species
A1 Casal Porras, Isabel
A1 Jiménez Ramos, Rocío
A1 Zubía Mendoza, Eva
A1 Brun Murillo, Fernando Guillermo
A2 Biología
A2 Química Orgánica
K1 Herbivory
K1 Cymodocea nodosa
K1 Zostera noltei
K1 Phenolic compounds
K1 Deterrent activity
K1 Sea urchin
AB Herbivory is a fundamental process regulating the functioning of the ecosystems both in land and marine systems.Few decades ago, herbivory was thought to play only a minor role in seagrass dominated areas, whilecurrently its importance has risen. However, the complex interrelationships between seagrasses and their consumersare not yet fully understood. For instance, seagrasses can tune up morphological, biomechanical,nutritional, and chemical traits in order to reduce the palatability of their leaves and therefore curtail tissuelosses, but the final tradeoff of such changes may depend on herbivore guilds. This work focuses on the relativeimportance of nutritional versus chemical traits in the feeding behavior of the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus, atemperate generalist mesograzer, over two sympatric seagrass species (Cymodocea nodosa and Zostera noltei). Todo that, a set of no-choice and multiple-choice feeding assays were conducted using freeze-dried plants agarbaseddiets (i.e. whole nutritional properties), polar extracts of both species (i.e. soluble sugars and phenolicnatural products), purified phenolic natural products, and also three different concentrations of soluble sugars.Later, a chemical identification and quantification of the phenolic natural products present in the extracts wereperformed to assess their ecological role as deterrents. Results clearly indicated that the feeding behavior of thisgeneralist herbivore, once overlooked the structural, morphological and biomechanical traits, is mainly determinedby nutritional properties, while the presence of phenolic compounds has only a minimal effect on itsfeeding behavior. In addition, although this study showed that sugars had a positive effect over P. lividus consumptionrates, we demonstrated for the first time the deterrent properties of rosmarinic acid and the sulphatedflavonoids produced by Z. noltei, which were able to reduce the attractive effect of sugars in the feeding preferenceof this generalist herbivore.
PB ELSEVIER
SN 0272-7714
YR 2021
FD 2021-06
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/24978
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/24978
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 11-nov-2026