Chemical Modulation of Marine Deposit Feeding

沉积物取食对于控制到达海底的所有颗粒的转移或掩埋是很重要的，其影响范围从通过营养网的流动到地层记录的解析。然而，除了少数值得注意的例外，燃料沉积喂养的资源仍然很难确定。通过分离食物检测和消化过程的化学检查和生物实验，本项目将尝试推广用于创建一对例外的方法。该项目将以预测物质通过生物体肠道时净吸收率最大化的理论为指导。该项目的重点是三个特定的过程，它们调节了导致这种最大化的过程，即嗅觉、味觉和通过肠壁的吸收。嗅觉和味觉将根据对扩散或接触化合物的反应，用化学的、操作的定义来确定。在实验室中引起取食反应的化合物的功效将在现场测试其作为引诱剂的作用。虽然感知能力和营养价值之间的相关性并不完美，但这种不完美影响了这些动物感知食物存在的能力，因此本身就很有趣。摄入食物的最佳肠道滞留时间的概念将注意力集中在食品质量的动力学定义上，其确定也可能导致可用食物资源的识别。通过测量消化食物进入肠壁的吸收情况，可以在普吉特海湾和缅因湾的一系列动物身上对这些吸收最大化模型进行明确的测试。

Deposit feeding is important in gating the transfer or burial of all particles that arrive at the seafloor, with implications ranging from flow through trophic webs to resolution of the stratigraphic record. The resources that fuel deposit feeding, however, remain poorly identified-with a few notable exceptions. By chemical examination and biological experimentation that isolate the processes of food detection and digestion this project will attempt to generalize the approach used to create a pair of those exceptions. This project will be guided by theory that predicts maximization of net absorption rate as material transits the gut of an organism. The focus of the project is on three specific processes that modulate processes leading to this maximization, namely smell, taste and absorption across the gut wall. Smell and taste will be determined with chemical, operational definitions based on response to diffused or contacted compounds. The efficacy of compounds that elicit feeding responses in the laboratory will be tested for their roles as attractants in the field. While the correlation between sensing ability and nutritional value will not be perfect, the imperfection affects the ability of these animals to sense the presence of food and so itself is of interest. The concept of optimal gut retention times of ingested food focuses attention on a kinetic definition of food quality, whose determination will also likely result in identification of usable food resources. Measurements of absorption of digested foods into the gut wall will allow explicit tests of these models of absorption maximization on a series of animals from Puget Sound and the Gulf of Maine.