MEASUREMENT OF THE CARRYING-CAPACITY OF BENTHIC HABITATS USING A METABOLIC-RATE BASED INDEX

Carrying capacities of grazed habitats are typically expressed as numbers or biomass of animals per unit area; however, such parameters are appropriate only when the body size of animals is constant because consumption and other metabolic-rate based parameters such as respiration and production are proportional to body mass raised by a power of almost-equal-to 0.75 rather than 0 or 1. Habitat carrying levels are therefore better expressed in the form of an index of total community consumption by summing the body masses of individual animals after they have been scaled using a biomass exponent of almost-equal-to 0.75. A parameter scaled in this way, P20, varied in a predictable manner when calculated for the mobile epifaunal assemblages associated with rope fibre habitats placed at marine and estuarine sites; P20 showed no significant difference between 17 shallow, clear-water sites worldwide, but declined consistently when photosynthesis was reduced. P2, also did not vary significantly when calculated for the mobile epifaunal communities associated with four Amphibolis antarctica sea-grass habitats in Australia (xBAR = 100 mug . g-1 . day-1), and reached but did not significantly exceed a ceiling of almost-equal-to 280 mug . g-1 . day-1 for Sargassum plants. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the production of shallow-water epifaunal communities of grazers is constrained by resource ceilings which can be quantified using metabolic-rate based indices. If this ''production ceiling'' hypothesis is correct then diffuse competition is generally more important than predation or environmental disturbance in restricting the growth of mobile epifaunal populations.