Camp, Emma F and Krause, Sophie-Louise and Santos, Lourianne MF and Naumann, Malik S and Kikuchi, Ruy KP and Smith, David J and Wild, Christian and Suggett, David J (2015) The “Flexi-Chamber”: A Novel Cost-Effective In Situ Respirometry Chamber for Coral Physiological Measurements. PLOS ONE, 10 (10). e0138800-e0138800. DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138800
Camp, Emma F and Krause, Sophie-Louise and Santos, Lourianne MF and Naumann, Malik S and Kikuchi, Ruy KP and Smith, David J and Wild, Christian and Suggett, David J (2015) The “Flexi-Chamber”: A Novel Cost-Effective In Situ Respirometry Chamber for Coral Physiological Measurements. PLOS ONE, 10 (10). e0138800-e0138800. DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138800
Camp, Emma F and Krause, Sophie-Louise and Santos, Lourianne MF and Naumann, Malik S and Kikuchi, Ruy KP and Smith, David J and Wild, Christian and Suggett, David J (2015) The “Flexi-Chamber”: A Novel Cost-Effective In Situ Respirometry Chamber for Coral Physiological Measurements. PLOS ONE, 10 (10). e0138800-e0138800. DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138800
Abstract
Coral reefs are threatened worldwide, with environmental stressors increasingly affecting the ability of reef-building corals to sustain growth from calcification (G), photosynthesis (P) and respiration (R). These processes support the foundation of coral reefs by directly influencing biogeochemical nutrient cycles and complex ecological interactions and therefore represent key knowledge required for effective reef management. However, metabolic rates are not trivial to quantify and typically rely on the use of cumbersome in situ respirometry chambers and/or the need to remove material and examine ex situ, thereby fundamentally limiting the scale, resolution and possibly the accuracy of the rate data. Here we describe a novel low-cost in situ respirometry bag that mitigates many constraints of traditional glass and plexi-glass incubation chambers. We subsequently demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel "Flexi-Chamber" approach via two case studies: 1) the Flexi-Chamber provides values of P, R and G for the reef-building coral Siderastrea cf. stellata collected from reefs close to Salvador, Brazil, which were statistically similar to values collected from a traditional glass respirometry vessel; and 2) wide-scale application of obtaining P, R and G rates for different species across different habitats to obtain inter- and intra-species differences. Our novel cost-effective design allows us to increase sampling scale of metabolic rate measurements in situ without the need for destructive sampling and thus significantly expands on existing research potential, not only for corals as we have demonstrated here, but also other important benthic groups.
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Animals; Anthozoa; Ecosystem; Photosynthesis; Coral Reefs |
Subjects: | Q Science > Q Science (General) |
Divisions: | Faculty of Science and Health Faculty of Science and Health > Life Sciences, School of |
SWORD Depositor: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email elements@essex.ac.uk |
Date Deposited: | 30 Oct 2015 08:45 |
Last Modified: | 30 Oct 2024 20:21 |
URI: | http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/15368 |
Available files
Filename: journal.pone.0138800.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0