Open Collections

Marino, Nicholas A. C.; Srivastava, Diane S.; Farjalla, Vinicius F.

<b>Abstract</b><br/>Predation risk in aquatic systems is often assessed by prey through chemical cues, either those released by prey or by the predator itself. Many studies on predation risk focus on simple pairwise interactions, with only a few studies examining community-level and ecosystem responses to predation risk in species-rich food webs. Further, of these few community-level studies, most assume that prey primarily assess predation risk through chemical cues from consumed prey, even heterospecific prey, rather than just those released by the predator. Here, we compared the effects of different predation cues (predator presence with or without consumed prey) on the structure and functioning of a speciose aquatic food web housed in tropical bromeliads. We found that the mere presence of the top predator (a damselfly) had a strong cascading effect on the food web, propagating down to nutrient cycling. This predation risk cue had no effect on the identity of colonizing species, but strongly reduced the abundance and biomass of the macroinvertebrate colonists. As a result, bacterial biomass and nitrogen cycling doubled, with a concomitant decrease in bacterial production, but CO2 flux was unaffected. These community and ecosystem effects of predator presence cues were not amplified by the addition of chemical cues from consumed prey. Our results show that some of the consequences of predation risk observed in controlled experiments with simplified food webs may be observed in a natural, species-rich food web.; <b>Usage notes</b><br /><div class="o-metadata__file-usage-entry"><h4 class="o-heading__level3-file-title">predator kairomones and prey cues</h4><div class="o-metadata__file-description">The file contains all the data used in the manuscript. The first column are the treatment names. The second, third and fourth columns are different descriptors of bromeliad morphology: these three measures (data centered and standardized) were used in a PCA, and the first axis of the ordination was used as a measure of bromeliad size (site scores were multiplied by -1, so that larger scores represented larger bromeliads). The other variables in the file are the response variables used in our study. The units of measurement are shown together with the variable names.</div><div class="o-metadata__file-name"></div></div>

Macae; Rio de Janeiro; Tropics

Dryad version number: 1</p>

Version status: submitted</p>

Dryad curation status: Published</p>

Sharing link: https://datadryad.org/stash/share/CVr4_C99SX4sD1VUcfJMcFLBlPlJ2gR1A_oLWqd0bYk</p>

Storage size: 22538</p>

Visibility: public</p>

University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0398076

https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/BS6YVP; https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3m2c3

Dataverse