Abyssal deposit feeders are secondary consumers of detritus and rely on nutrition derived from microbial communities in their guts.

ABSTRACT: Trophic ecology of detrital-based food webs is still poorly understood. Abyssal plains depend entirely on detritus and are among the most understudied ecosystems, with deposit feeders dominating megafaunal communities. We used compound-specific stable isotope ratios of amino acids (CSIA-AA) to estimate the trophic position of three abundant species of deposit feeders collected from the abyssal plain of the Northeast Pacific (Station M; ~ 4000 m depth), and compared it to the trophic position of their gut contents and the surrounding sediments. Our results suggest that detritus forms the base of the food web and gut contents of deposit feeders have a trophic position consistent with primary consumers and are largely composed of a living biomass of heterotrophic prokaryotes. Subsequently, de

SUBMITTER: Romero-Romero S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8206261 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature