Abstract
Our study deals with the lipid biochemistry of the krill community in the ecosystem of the high Arctic Kongsfjord (Svalbard). During the last decades, Kongsfjord experienced a change in krill species composition due to recent increased advection of Atlantic water masses carrying characteristic boreal as well as subtropical-boreal euphausiids into the ecosystem. The lipid biochemistry and trophic relationships of the species recently inhabiting the Arctic water masses are scarcely known, although a change in a krill population may have a significant impact on the ecosystem. A comparison of nutrition and energy storage strategies, stable isotopes, lipid profiles and fatty acid compositions showed remarkable differences between the krill species. These reflected the diverse feeding behaviours and specific adaptations to the environments of their origin: the boreal Meganyctiphanes norvegica and subtropical Nematoscelis megalops appear more carnivorous and have significantly lower mean lipid contents (29 and 10 %, respectively) and a different energy storage pattern (triacylglycerols and polar lipids, respectively) than the arcto-boreal Thysanoessa inermis, which consists of up to 54 % of lipids mainly stored as wax esters (>40 %). These differences may have significant implications for the rapidly changing marine food web of Kongsfjord—especially for higher trophic levels relying on the nutritional input of animal lipids.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the captain, the crew and the scientists including the chief of AREX2012 on-board RV Oceania for their great hospitality and assistance during sampling. For the same, we thank the captains of the Kings Bay AS workboat MS Teisten. We are very grateful for the professional support by the AWIPEV station leaders and (logistic) engineers, Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen. We thank Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hagen, Petra Wencke and colleagues from BreMarE—Centre for Research & Education (University of Bremen, Department Marine Zoology, Germany) for the use of their facilities and help in lipid extraction. We are grateful to Dieter Janssen, Stefanie Baßler, Mandy Kiel and Ruth Alheit for their skilful assistance in lipid analyses at the AWI laboratories, Bremerhaven. Furthermore, we thank R. Alheit for the final language edit as a native speaker. Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Michael Greenacre (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) for the detailed advice on the statistical analyses; and thank you for the music. This work was supported by the French–German AWIPEV project KOP 124_1-5, RIS ID 3451. NE-Atlantic samples were obtained under the EU-FP7 project EURO-BASIN and from the Benguela current under BMBF-GENUS, 03F0497F, Germany.
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This article belongs to the special issue on the “Kongsfjorden ecosystem—new views after more than a decade of research”, coordinated by Christian Wiencke and Haakon Hop.
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Huenerlage, K., Graeve, M. & Buchholz, F. Lipid composition and trophic relationships of krill species in a high Arctic fjord. Polar Biol 39, 1803–1817 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-014-1607-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-014-1607-6