This award will support collaborative research in biological oceanography between Dr. Robert Feller, University of South Carolina and two British scientists: Dr. Richard Warwick, Plymouth Marine Laboratory and Dr. Peter Boyle, University of Aberdeen. This joint effort addresses the solution of common problems encountered in the visual (microscope-aided) analysis of marine food webs involving bottom-dwelling predators which grind, chew, or rapidly digest their prey. Immunochemical methods have been developed to help solve this problem of how to identify "invisible", but energetically important, prey in the stomach contents of scavenging predators. Polyclonal antibodies are used as probes to identify solubilized proteins from such prey as nematodes, copepods and soft-bodied worms. Immunoassays of shrimp and juvenile fishes have shown that these quickly digested prey can often, but incorrectly, be relegated to inconsequential status compared with less rapidly digested prey. Research collaborators in the U.K. offer expertise in the ecology and energetics of nearshore food webs involving bottom-dwelling organisms (Dr. R.M. Warwick, Plymouth) and in the quantitative immunological analysis of marine food chains (Dr. P. R. Boyle, Aberdeen). Dr. Feller has expertise in ecological applications of immunology and trophic dynamics of bottom-dwelling crustaceans. The investigators will examine the stomach contents of juvenile shore crabs and sand shrimp important to fisheries of the U.K. to see if previously published diet descriptions are biased towards digestion-resistent prey. They have also designed an additional comparative study of the effectiveness of several antibody probes developed independently to identify proteins from similar prey organisms. Both studies will prove the utility of immunological methods for solving these otherwise intractable trophic analysis problems.
