Question and answer. Ecology, Geochemistry, Water, Climate change.
What is the role of pellets of mollusks in the geochemical fluxes of chemical elements?
http://5bio5.blogspot.com/2014/09/question-and-answer-ecology.html
http://5bio5.blogspot.com/2014/09/question-and-answer-ecology.html
(Explanation of the terminology: Pellets are the small conglomerates of undigested organic material that is being excreted by various aquatic invertebrates, e.g. by aquatic mollusks).
Answer to this question was given here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259579605_Pellets-of-some-mollusks-in-the-biogeochemical-flows-of-C-N-P-Si-and-Al
Area of science: geochemistry, biogeochemistry, water ecology, geochemistry of carbon: fluxes of carbon and other chemical elements.
Answer:
Until recently, the role of pellets (pieces of undigested organic matter, pseudofaeces, faeces) excreted by aquatic mollusks in biogeochemical fluxes of chemical elements was underestimated. This issue was revisited in the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259579605_
In this paper, unique results were reported: the measurements of the transfer of matter and chemical elements (C, N, P, and some others, in mg) with pellets of bivalves (a sample from a natural community of Unionidae) per unit biomass of mollusks and per unit area of the ecosystem from which the mollusks were collected. Also, the analogous results for a natural community of mollusks Lymnaea stagnalis.
This is a first paper that reported results of measurements of the biogeochemical fluxes with pellets. As a result, a new aspect of the significant role of mollusks in ecological chemistry and in transfer of some important chemical elements through aquatic ecosystems was discovered.
This study discovered new important facts on transfer of carbon; the ecological chemistry of carbon is a key factor in aggravating or mitigating climate change hazards.
