TITLE:
Recovery Process on Soft-Bottom Macrobenthic Communities after Artificial Disturbance in Tropical Polluted Estuary (Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
AUTHORS:
Cecília do Valle Pinto Pereira, Leandro Amaro Pessoa, Marcos Aurélio Vasconcelos de Freitas, Carlos Alejandro Echeverría
KEYWORDS:
Sucession; Recolonization; Defaunation; Metapopulation Dynamics; Dispersion Processes
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Marine Science,
Vol.3 No.4,
October
15,
2013
ABSTRACT: The regime of disturbance with natural or anthropogenic origin can lead to the destabilization or even to a mass mortality of benthic communities. Due to the heterogeneity of the disturbance there is a formation of patches in different stages of ecological succession. The aim of this study is to follow and describe the resilience in artificial disturbed sediment in a polluted bay in Rio de Janeiro. The sediment was collected, sterilized and placed inside corers (10 cmdiameter ×15 cmheight) in the same place where it was collected. We allocated the samples in two structures, the difference between them was that one was placed closed to the bottom and the other was placed50 cmheight. We found 2352 organisms distributed in 14 taxons. The class Polychaeta and the order Amphipoda showed the highest density in all the survey and treatments. We identified the factors influencing the scenarium: different mechanisms of dispersal, the position of the structures and life history of each group. Disturbance can be the main cause of the patch’s diversity found in estuaries and coastal areas. Because of this, monitoring of selected areas becomes an important tool to understand the regime of disturbance as a key factor structuring benthic communities in soft sediment, also suggesting a metapopulation dynamics.