PDF Ebook The Diet of Worms : A Study of Polychaete Feeding Guilds
Polychaetes are among the most frequent and abundant marine metazoans in benthic environments. In bathyal and abyssal areas (Hessler & Jumars, 1974), in shelf depths on open coasts (Barnard & Hartman, 1959; Boesch, 1972), in estuaries (Boesch, 1971 ; Orth, 1973), in man-made harbours (Reish, 1959), and on coral reefs (Kohn & Lloyd, 1973), polychaetes are also among the most 'species-rich' groups . They often comprise over one third the number of macrobenthic species and may be even more dominant in numbers of specimens (Knox, 1977). Polychaetes may be numerically less important on hard substrata, and bivalves and various peracarid crustaceans may co-dominate in soft sediments, but of all metazoans only the nematodes are more ubiquitous.
Polychaetes must thus be included in calculations of community trophic structure and in community energy budgets (e.g. Banse, Nichols & May, 1971 ; Pamatmat, 1977) . Despite their obvious importance the literature on ecological roles of polychaetes remains largely anecdotal. This review attempts to summarize current information about the feeding biology of these animals . We have organized the information into a limited number of patterns, using the guild concept to define our patterns . The concept of a guild (in the sense of a functional grouping) has proved to be a valuable tool both in generalizations and for continuing investigations in various animal and plant taxa (e.g. Grime, 1974 ; Karr & James, 1975) .
Provisional attempts at delineating feeding guilds among benthic polychaetes (Jumars & Fauchald, 1977) allowed generalizations to be drawn and revealed several unexpected trends. There are other useful ways to form functional groups of polychaetes (e.g. by reproductive behaviours or degrees of opportunism), but the morphology and behaviour of feeding appears so important that we suspect most alternative functional groups will show considerable overlap with the one developed here .
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PDF Ebook The Diet of Worms : A Study of Polychaete Feeding Guilds
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