Invasive mangrove removal and recovery: food web effects across a chronosequence
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2012-12
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle) was introduced to Hawaiʻi in 1902 and has since overgrown many coastal areas in Hawaiʻi, transforming nearshore sandy habitat into heavily vegetated areas with low water velocity, high sedimentation rates, and anoxic sediments. Mangrove forests provide habitat for exotic species, including burrowing predators, which can exert top-down effects on benthic communities. Removal of mangrove overstory is a popular management technique; here we use infauna community structure, crab catch data, and a cage experiment performed over a chronosequence of removals from 2007-2010 to show that overstory removal causes gradual changes in community composition, that community shifts are concurrent with a slow decomposition of sedimentary mangrove biomass (k = 5.6 ! 10-4 ± 0.9 ! 10-4 d-1), and that burrowing predators do not have significant effects on the infaunal community where R. mangle is intact or where it has been removed. Changes over time after removal include an increase in total infaunal abundance, a decrease in sub-surface deposit feeders, and an increase in suspension-feeding worms. Burrowing crab densities are uniform across mangrove and removal sites, and do not affect infaunal communities as they do in native mangroves. These results show that recovery from invasion and removal occurs gradually and is not governed by top-down effects.
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invasive species, food webs, Rhizophora mangle, mangrove
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Theses for the degree of Master of Science (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Zoology.
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