Acronym COPAS
Category
Aquaculture
Title Understanding top-down control in coastal bloom-forming protists: opening the parasitic compartment Programme National Programme
Instrument (FP6)
Contact Type (FP7)
Strand (Interreg)
NA
Theme (FP7)
Activity Area (FP6)
Regional Area (Interreg)
Action (COST)
NA
Specific Programme (FP7)
NA
Funding source National Coordinator Esther Garces Pieres Coordinator email NA
Coordinator institution
CSIC - Spanish National Research Council (Spain)
Institutions involved
NA
Start year 2018 End year 2020 Funding (€) € 164,802 Website NA Summary Main interactions between sea and society happen in coastal environments. This area is especially affected by harmful algal blooms, causing serious disturbances in economic, leisure, aquaculture activities. In this context, mechanism of parasitism recently emerged as an important agent in the top-down control of phytoplankton proliferations. Parasitism is the most common interaction between predators and prey and has evolved to encompass nearly all branches of the tree of life. Recent molecular environmental studies have revealed a great diversity of parasites in the open ocean. But while there is no longer any doubt that parasites play a dominant role in the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems, much of the research on the diversity, distribution, and abundance and their role in trophic interactions in marine ecosystems remains descriptive. The failure to adequately identify parasites and their effects within a host population will result in biased parameterizations in food-web transfer-efficiency models. Previous studies have pointed out that dinoflagellate blooms are affected by zoosporic parasitoids. In COPAS we aim to answer several relevant questions about parasitoids during proliferations of their microalgal hosts in coastal ecosystems. These blooms are local, recurrent and short-time events of high cellular abundance and low diversity that favour parasitic infections and based on the knowledge of the meroplanktonic life-cycle of the parasitoids, our hypothesis is that the sediment should act as a diversity reservoir of dormant stages during no-bloom periods in these shallow coastal areas. Additionally, our hypothesis is that the interactions of bloom-forming dinoflagellates and their co-occurring parasitoids condition their presence and distribution. Whether different parasitoids species have an extensive distribution and proliferate at sites preferred by their blooming hosts, or conversely, if they have a restricted distribution, in accordance with their preferred host, remains to be determined. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the ecological aspects of the parasite-host relationship is the focus of COPASs. Therefore, the main objectives are: 1. To evaluate the diversity and abundance of the parasites that infect the phytoplankton species proliferating in the water column and sediments of coastal areas; 2. To explore the host specificity of these parasites in situ and in the lab and their relationship with host spatial distribution. Therefore, the expected scientific impacts of copas are: i) an increase in scientific knowledge of parasitoid taxonomy, physiology, and ecology and of the impact of parasitoids on aquatic protist community composition; ii) a greater awareness of the occurrence of zoosporic parasites in the food web; and iii) potential translation of the newly acquired knowledge to the applied sciences and to improving aquaculture practices. Finally, the acquired knowledge is not only applicable to current conceptual models of marine parasitism, it is also of direct relevance to understanding parasitic mechanisms in general. Our findings will have applications in other fields of parasite research, since while a model will be developed for a marine system, the mechanisms governing parasite-host relationships are common, occurring in agriculture, between crops and pests, and in epidemics, between humans and pathogenic microbes.
Keywords
Impacts;
Algae;
Parasite;
Biology;
Food web;
Marine Region
76
Not associated to marine areas
0
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