Creese--Molluscan grazers in north-eastern NZ

New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research abstracts

Ecology of molluscan grazers and their interactions with marine algae in north-eastern New Zealand: a review

ROBERT G. CREESE

Leigh Marine Laboratory University of Auckland Private Bag, Auckland New Zealand

Abstract Molluscan grazers are known to exert an important influence on the overall structure of benthic marine communities. Published information on grazers in these communities in New Zealand is currently insufficient to propose any general models for the nature or role of herbivore-algal infractions in this country. However, a considerable amount of unpublished material exists for interiidal and shallow subtidal rocky reefs in north-eastern New Zealand. Much of the information is from unpublished theses, and this review summarises this material and discusses it in the light of published accounts from the northeastern coast (especially the areas around Leigh, Northland), and studies from elsewhere within and outside New Zealand. While some reasonably well-supported models for subtidal grazers can now be formulated, the intertidal material is still too diffuse to allow meaningful models to be proposed. Suggestions are made as to the type of additional data that is required to complement and augment the material that already exists.

Keywords rocky reefs; ecology; molluscs; grazers; algae;rocky reefs

PDF file of entire paper: medium quality (1675K); (scanned from paper original: notes about this process)

This year's abstracts | Journal home page | All abstracts | Publishing home page