Fig 1.
Fatty acid relative (% total FA, %TFA) and absolute (ng C ind-1)concentrations in diatoms (C. weissflogii, n = 4) and in L. conchilega larvae (n = 3 with 50 individuals pooled per sample).
Data for larvae are differentiated between organisms sampled in situ and after 5 days of feeding on the diatom. Standard error bars are shown for the mean values.
Table 1.
Dry mass (DM, in μg ind-1); carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and total lipid contents (TLC) (ng larvae-1 / diatom: μg L-1 (pg cell-1)); molar C:N ratio; and FA-specific absolute (ng C larvae-1) and relative (larvae: ‰ body C (italics, second row) / diatom: ‰ cell C / all: % total FA, in parenthesis) composition of L. conchilega larvae and its diet, the diatom C. weissflogii.
Fig 2.
13C isotopic enrichment (atom%) of C. weissflogii daily batch cultures fed to polychaete larvae during the experiment.
Straight lines represent atom% values for the fatty acid (FA) 18:0, whereas boxplots and open circles represent average atom% values from all the other FAs. The minimum and maximum observation values are represented by the lower and upper whiskers (respectively), the first and third quartiles are represented by the lower and upper hinges (respectively), and the median is shown as the line that divides the box.
Table 2.
Total fatty acid (TFA) and FA-specific (> 1% TFA) 13C isotopic enrichment for C. weissflogii (atom%) and L. conchilega (APE); and carbon assimilation (Cassim, as ng C ind-1 (% total C assimilated)) and turnover rate (Cturn, as % day-1) for L. conchilega.
Fig 3.
Dendrograms generated with Bray-Curtis similarity matrices comparing fatty acid profiles of L. conchilega larvae.
Similarity matrices present data on the FA profile of larvae sampled in situ and after 5 days of feeding on the diatom C. weissflogii. Only FAs with relative content > 1% TFA were used to generate the similarity matrices. a) logit transformed relative values for FA composition (% TFA). b) absolute (ng C ind-1) values for FA composition.
Fig 4.
FA-specific carbon assimilation (ng C ind-1, left panels) and turnover (%, right panels) in L. conchilega larvae after the feeding experiment (n = 3).
Values are shown for the sum of all fatty acids (TFA), saturated (SFA), monounsaturated (MUFA), and polyunsaturated (PUFA) fatty acids (upper panels); and for specific FAs (lower panels).
Table 3.
Total lipid content (TLC, in % dry mass) and wax ester content (WE, in % total lipid content) of several meroplanktonic and holoplanktonic species.