Elsevier

Harmful Algae

Volume 79, November 2018, Pages 50-52
Harmful Algae

Can domoic acid affect escape response in copepods?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hal.2018.08.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Copepods are important grazers on toxic phytoplankton and serve as vectors for algal toxins up the marine food web. Success of phytoplankton depends among other factors on protection against grazers like copepods, and same way copepod survival and population resilience relies on their ability to escape predators. Little is, however, known about the effect of toxins on the escape response of copepods. In this study we experimentally tested the hypothesis that the neurotoxin domoic acid (DA) produced by the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia affects escape responses of planktonic copepods. We found that the arctic copepods Calanus hyperboreus and C. glacialis reduced their escape response after feeding on a DA-producing diatom. The two species were not affected the same way; C. hyperboreus was affected after shorter exposure and less intake of DA. The negative effect on escape response was not related to the amount of DA accumulated in the copepods. Our results suggest that further research on the effects of DA on copepod behavior and DA toxicity mechanisms is required to evaluate the anti-grazing function of DA.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the crew on Arctic Station and local hunters in Qeqertarsuaq. We thank Lumi Haraguchi for valuable help with the statistical analysis and Ditte Marie Hjort for assistance with experiments. The project is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark, grant DFF–1323-00258 and partially financed by the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren through the research programme “Polar regions And Coasts in the changing Earth System” (PACES II) of the Alfred Wegener

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      However, a discontinuous grazing rate, i.e. a change in temporal grazing pattern, have been seen in two copepod species, C. finmarchicus and C. hyperboreus (Tammilehto et al., 2015), and in krill (Bargu and Silver 2003). An increase in grazer mortality was recently seen in a long-time study with A. tonsa (Lundholm et al. 2018), a reduction in escape response was seen in Calanus (Harðardóttir et al., 2018b), and changes in expression of genes related to cellular regulative processes and changes in metabolic pathways in Calanus (Harðardóttir et al., 2018a). We found, for the first time, a strong negative correlation between cellular DA content of P. multiseries and ingestion and/or clearance rates of Artemia nauplii (Tables 1&2).

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      Very recently, it has been shown that DA levels increased in Pseudo-nitzschia by exudates of predatory copepods (Tammilehto et al., 2015). Furthermore, escape response levels of copepods decrease under a toxic Pseudo-nitzschia diet (Harðardottir et al., 2018). This strongly suggests that DA production may be involved in an inducible defence mechanism of at least some Pseudo-nitzschia species against grazing.

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      Finally, cellular DA contents were significantly higher (up to 5 fold) in all treatments of P. seriata and P. obtusa strains, after induction by herbivorous copepods (Calanus finmarchicus, Centropages hamatus and Acartia tonsa), and the induced DA content correlated with copepodamide concentration, suggesting that copepodamides (a group of polar lipids excreted by copepods) are the inducing cues that triggers DA production in Pseudo-nitzschia (Lundholm et al., 2018). Carnivorous copepods do not induce toxin production, supporting the hypothesis of DA production being part of a defense mechanism (Lundholm et al., 2018), which is further strengthened by a reduction in copepod escape response after feeding on DA producing diatoms (Harðardóttir et al., 2018b). In the present study, the increase in cellular DA content was 3–4 fold in P. lundholmiae (MC4218) and 23 fold in P. multiseries (MC4177), representing a significant increase due to induction by brine shrimps.

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