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Understanding coasts: Barnacles show the way

A major challenge in ecology is to understand how local conditions, such as habitat, combine with larger scale patterns, like climate, to produce the patterns of distribution and abundance of animals and plants in nature.  In a recently published study, a team led by Mike Burrows have shown how useful barnacles are in integrating the effects of local and regional conditions in coastal ecosystems.

Barnacles, like the Acorn barnacles Semibalanus balanoides shown on the left, live attached to rocks and other objects and feed by filtering plankton from the water above their permanent homes. By measuring and counting these animals at over 200 rocky shores around Scotland, Mike has shown that the main species in northern UK grows faster and larger where plankton is abundant, and that wave-exposed rocks are more barnacle-encrusted than those in sheltered conditions. 

Ocean colour from satellite sensors is a good indicator of feeding conditions for barnacles, while the distance from each rocky shore to the nearest land predicts wave conditions well.  The data collected is consistent with the idea that large-scale variation in food supply drives growth, and the concentration of food and barnacle larvae combines with small-scale patterns of waves and water-flow to drive abundance in this species.

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