Metabolic depression in sea urchin barrens associated with food deprivation

Abstract

The proliferation of sea urchins can raze macroalgal forests in coastal ecosystems. Such phenomena can reduce some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet (Schiel and Foster 2015) to low productivity "urchin barrens” (Filbee-Dexter and Scheibling 2014). Although urchins inhabiting these food-depauperate barrens face starvation, many survive in these barrens for years or decades by eating food subsidies from drift algae (Rodríguez 2003, Vanderklift and Wernberg 2008, Britton-Simmons et al. 2009, Renaud et al. 2015, Quintanilla-Ahumada et al. 2018), pelagic salps (Duggins 1981), tubeworms (Spindel and Okamoto personal observation), as well as encrusting and filamentous algae, microbial mats, and slow-growing species resistant to herbivory (Ling and Johnson 2009, Filbee-Dexter and Scheibling 2014, Rasher et al. 2020).