Meeting Abstract
An important ecological role of polychaetes in marine benthic environments is that they provide the exclusive prey of most members of by far the largest marine gastropod Superfamily, the Conoidea, including all of its families. This talk poses the questions: 1) Is the specialized venom-assisted prey-capture mechanism of conoideans adapted to the particular polychaetes they capture, and if so in what ways? 2) Do the prey polychaetes have structural or behavioral defensive adaptations that enable them to deter or avoid conoidean predators, and if so, how effective are they? 3) Can we detect evidence of coevolutionary arms races? Sally Woodin and I planned to collaborate on a study of these questions after she completed her Ph.D. work, but we were never able to do so. This presentation will thus be relatively data-free, but it seeks to articulate hypotheses, marshal evidence from other relevant studies over the past 40 years, and encourage others to explore these poorly known but widespread and ecologically important predator-prey relationships.
