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Journal article
Coupling between landward and seaward fringes of sandy beaches: algal deposits on the upper beach influence biogeochemistry and faunal assemblages in the swash zone
Marine Biology, Vol.172(2), pp.1-11
2025
Abstract
Energy subsidies from the sea typically underpin ocean-exposed sandy beach ecosystems. Strandings of detached macroalgae – ‘wrack’ – can be a spectacular form of such cross-ecosystem transfers of organic matter that sustain consumers in the recipient shore system; this has given rise to a model of wrack promoting the diversity and abundance of invertebrates, with scaling effects on upper trophic levels.
However, most wrack is often wave-cast to the upper beach, whereas a distinct part of the shore fauna is limited to the ocean fringe of beaches – the ‘swash zone’. This has the potential to create a spatial asymmetry between the location of subsidies (concentrated at the landwards fringe) and the location of some of the putative recipients distributed at the ocean fringe.
Here, we tested whether the fauna of the swash zone can benefit from wrack subsidies, by sampling fauna and algal deposits on a range of beaches in NW Spain. We also measured the potential functional link between algal wrack and nutrients released from wrack during decay.
Wrack decay increased nutrient concentrations, and it is the combination of wrack cover, nutrient levels, and sediment coarseness that jointly drove variation in the assemblage structure of the swash fauna among beaches. Similarly, the density of the swash fauna and species richness increased markedly at higher nutrient levels and wrack cover.
Filter feeders were an important compartment in the food web of the swash macrofauna; we hypothesize that wrack deposits in the upper beach enhance food availability for this trophic guild via increasing nutrients in the water column, stimulating primary production and providing particulate organic matter derived from algal decay. Besides, several polychaetes and peracarid species function as secondary consumers and detritus feeders that plausibly benefit, directly or indirectly, on the particulate organic matter that accumulates on the sediment surface or percolates into the interstitial environment.
These findings expand the ‘wrack enhancement’ model to include the promotion of consumers at the ocean edge of sandy shores; it also contains a cross-shore linkage via decomposition processes that favourably change the nutrient regime across all the beach face and thereby couple the swash zone with the upper strandline.
Details
- Title
- Coupling between landward and seaward fringes of sandy beaches: algal deposits on the upper beach influence biogeochemistry and faunal assemblages in the swash zone
- Authors
- M Lastra (Corresponding Author) - Universidade de VigoL De Pablo - University of Colorado BoulderJ López - Universidade de VigoF Soliño - Universidade de VigoT A Schlacher - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Science, Technology and Engineering
- Publication details
- Marine Biology, Vol.172(2), pp.1-11
- Publisher
- Springer
- Date published
- 2025
- DOI
- 10.1007/s00227-024-04524-0
- ISSN
- 1432-1793; 0025-3162
- Copyright note
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Data Availability
- The datasets generated during and/or analyzed for the current study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
- Grant note
- This study received financial support from XUNTA de Galicia, España (Projects Ref.: ED431C 2017/46-GRC and ED431C 2018/54 -GRC).
- Organisation Unit
- School of Science, Technology and Engineering
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991100144802621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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