Route To Resilience

A new study suggests that herbivores can protect ecosystems from climate change.

- Akshit Sangomla

FOR REBECCA Kordas, the ocean shore has become a new laboratory for unique experimentation. Her study area was the shore of Ruckle Park on British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island off Canada’s Pacific coast, where she kept a check on the tiny marine ecosystems that she has grown on specially-designed settlement plates—live miniature laboratories that scientists use to culture organisms.

By studying these intertidal ecosystems, which exist along the shore in the region of high and low tide of the sea, she was trying to understand how they develop and change over a period of time, especially when the population of a particular species is increased. She also analysed how external changes like heat affects such ecosystems and how they resist these changes. “I love doing experiments out in nature (rather than in a lab),” says Kordas, currently a research fellow at London’s Imperial College.

Kordas placed the settlement plates in an actual intertidal zone in a one of a kind experiment. The clean plates soon filled up with all kinds of tiny marine animals and plants creating an ecosystem from scratch. Then limpets, which are native to these areas and also the dominant herbivores, were introduced into some of the plates, keeping other plates devoid of the animals to make a comparison.

Through her experiments, Kordas has established that the introduction of limpets in an ecosystem can make it more diverse . Limpets basically eat the micro algae which frees up the space for other organisms like barnacles and shrimps. Barnacles also become homes for a myriad other organisms like snails. This increases the overall diversity of the ecosystem.