Feeding Ecology and Nutritional Dynamics in Coastal Marine Systems

Feeding ecology and nutritional dynamics in coastal marine systems encompasses the study of how marine organisms acquire, assimilate and utilise energy and nutrients within nearshore environments. These systems are characterised by complex food webs in which primary producers—such as phytoplankton, macroalgae and seagrasses—support a diverse array of consumers from filter-feeding invertebrates to top predators. Nutrient inputs from terrestrial run-off, upwelling and tidal mixing govern primary productivity, influencing the quantity and quality of available food. Consumers exhibit a range of foraging strategies, including generalist grazing, selective feeding and ontogenetic dietary shifts, that reflect adaptations to spatial and temporal variability in resource distribution and nutritional value. Interactions among species often result in non-additive effects on ecosystem processes, such as complementarity among co-occurring consumers enhancing overall resource use. Anthropogenic pressures, including climate warming, eutrophication and habitat alteration, are reshaping feeding interactions by altering nutrient regimes, food-web structure and the physiological demands of organisms. Integrating biochemical tracers, high-resolution imaging, remote-sensing and ecological experiments has advanced our understanding of energy flow and nutrient cycling in coastal zones, with practical implications for fisheries management, conservation and the restoration of critical habitats such as seagrass meadows and kelp forests.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies employing compound-specific stable isotope analysis have revealed fine-scale heterogeneity in trophic transfer efficiencies across estuarine gradients, demonstrating that subtle shifts in nutrient source and primary producer composition can cascade through multiple consumer levels. Innovative meta-analyses combining environmental DNA sampling with automated imaging systems have quantified how rising sea temperatures influence the nutritional quality of key herbivores and the cascading impacts on algal biomass and community structure. Concurrently, integration of satellite-derived chlorophyll data with in situ nutrient flux measurements has enabled the linkage of episodic primary production events in seagrass and kelp habitats to consumer growth rates, underscoring the importance of temporal synchrony between resource pulses and feeding activity. These advances highlight the value of multidisciplinary approaches to decipher the drivers of feeding interactions and nutrient dynamics in dynamic coastal ecosystems.

Feeding Ecology and Nutritional Dynamics in Coastal Marine Systems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in feeding ecology and nutritional dynamics in coastal marine systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Trophic transfer efficiency: The proportion of energy or nutrients passed from one trophic level to the next.

Stable isotope analysis: A biochemical technique that uses ratios of isotopes (e.g., carbon-13, nitrogen-15) to trace the flow of nutrients through food webs.

Ontogenetic dietary shift: Changes in diet composition that occur as an organism grows and matures.

Complementarity effects: Enhanced ecosystem functioning resulting from the combined resource use of species with different feeding niches.

Primary production: The synthesis of organic compounds from inorganic sources by autotrophs, forming the base of marine food webs.

Environmental DNA (eDNA): Genetic material shed by organisms into their environment, used to detect and quantify species presence and abundance.

References

1. Latitudinal Discontinuity in Thermal Conditions along the Nearshore of Central-Northern Chile. PLOS ONE (2014).
2. Nonadditive effects of consumption in an intertidal macroinvertebrate community are independent of food availability but driven by complementarity effects. Ecology and Evolution (2018).
3. Lack of Impact of Posidonia oceanica Leaf Nutrient Enrichment on Sarpa salpa Herbivory: Additional Evidence for the Generalist Consumer Behavior of This Cornerstone Mediterranean Herbivore. PLOS ONE (2016).