Meeting Abstract
Highly variable environments can make it difficult to characterize individual organisms’ experiences, even for sessile species such as mussels and barnacles. Dense aggregations of the mussel Mytilus californianus provide habitat for hundreds of other intertidal species, and these mussel beds may appear relatively homogeneous, but there can be substantial differences in thermal stress and wave stress over spatial scales of only a few mussel body lengths. We have developed a custom datalogger and sensor array that facilitates high resolution, multi-week monitoring of individual mussel status, including internal body temperature, body orientation, and valve gaping behavior. Our open-source hardware design, based on the Arduino software and hardware ecosystem, along with our analysis software, allows us to reconstruct the thermal history and behavioral patterns of individual mussels in natural conditions, and could be extended to include additional sensors such as heart rate monitors in the future. We have used these tools to provide unique insight into the physiological status of mussels. For individuals located only centimeters apart, we observe maximum body temperature differences of up to 14°C, and differences in time spent gaping widely of more than 14 h per day. This type of low-cost, long-duration monitoring system provides individualized data streams for organisms living in highly heterogeneous habitats such as the wave-swept rocky shore, facilitating deeper exploration of organism-environment interactions in the field.
