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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Marine chemical ecology: chemical signals and cues structure marine populations, communities, and ecosystems.

Mark E. Hay
- 25 Mar 2009 - 
- Vol. 1, Iss: 1, pp 193-212
TLDR
How chemical cues regulate critical aspects of the behavior of marine organisms from bacteria to phytoplankton to benthic invertebrates and water column fishes is reviewed.
Abstract
Chemical cues constitute much of the language of life in the sea. Our understanding of biotic interactions and their effects on marine ecosystems will advance more rapidly if this language is studied and understood. Here, I review how chemical cues regulate critical aspects of the behavior of marine organisms from bacteria to phytoplankton to benthic invertebrates and water column fishes. These chemically mediated interactions strongly affect population structure, community organization, and ecosystem function. Chemical cues determine foraging strategies, feeding choices, commensal associations, selection of mates and habitats, competitive interactions, and transfer of energy and nutrients within and among ecosystems. In numerous cases, the indirect effects of chemical signals on behavior have as much or more effect on community structure and function as the direct effects of consumers and pathogens. Chemical cues are critical for understanding marine systems, but their omnipresence and impact are inadequ...

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Citations
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Ocean Acidification: The Other CO 2 Problem

TL;DR: The potential for marine organisms to adapt to increasing CO2 and broader implications for ocean ecosystems are not well known; both are high priorities for future research as mentioned in this paper, and both are only imperfect analogs to current conditions.
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Larval Dispersal and Marine Population Connectivity

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Centuries of Human-Driven Change in Salt Marsh Ecosystems

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Advances in Quantifying Air-Sea Gas Exchange and Environmental Forcing*

TL;DR: It is shown how the use of global variables of environmental forcing that have recently become available and gas exchange relationships that incorporate the main forcing factors will lead to improved estimates of global and regional air-sea gas fluxes based on better fundamental physical, chemical, and biological foundations.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Inducible chemical resistance to herbivory in the brown seaweed ascophyllum nodosum

TL;DR: The results suggest that grazing by L. obtusata can be an important factor in explaining natural phenotypic variation in the phlorotannin content of Ascophyllum, and support the previously proposed hypothesis that it is feeding by relatively small, less mobile herbivores that is most likely to cue for induced production of defense chemicals in seaweeds.
Journal ArticleDOI

Chemical signaling processes in the marine environment

TL;DR: There are now vast new opportunities for determining how organisms respond to chemical signals and employ chemical defenses under environmentally realistic conditions, and integrating findings within a larger ecological and evolutionary framework should lead to improved understanding of natural physicochemical phenomena that constrain biological responses at the individual, population, and community levels of organization.
Journal ArticleDOI

Herbivore Resistance to Seaweed Chemical Defense: The Roles of Mobility and Predation Risk

J. Emmett Duffy, +1 more
- 01 Jul 1994 - 
TL;DR: It is confirmed that association with chemically defended plants can reduce predation on generalist, as well as specialist, herbivores and suggested that preferential feeding on chemically defending plants is most likely for sedentary mesograzers because low mobility enhances the ability to exploit chemically defended seaweeds as refuges from fish predation.
Journal ArticleDOI

Bottom-up dynamics of allochthonous input: direct and indirect effects of seabirds on islands

TL;DR: This work analyzes how seabirds affect the abundance of a dominant consumer group, tene- brionid beetles, on 25 islands in the Gulf of California over a three-year period to show that seab birds significantly affect beetles by two distinct pathways.
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Marine carrion and scavengers

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