Meeting Abstract
Group living is a common feature in many disparate taxa and is known to confer a wide range of advantages including anti-predator defense, enhanced foraging, and reduced costs related to locomotion. As we continue to assess the influence of environmental dynamics on species’ physiology, it is important to incorporate essential behaviors, such as grouping, as a part of experimental design in order to arrive at more accurate projections. Squid are ecologically and economically important motile marine predators that demonstrate remarkably high standard metabolic rates and thus are particularly sensitive to environmental variation. Although all squid species whose metabolisms have been examined form groups during most of their lives, all respirometry experiments conducted thus far have been on individual squid, with few attempting to simulate the presence of conspecifics. As has been demonstrated in other ecologically-similar marine animals, it is possible that the standard metabolic rates of squid have been overestimated due to the stress generated from being isolated from conspecifics. We report on the results of a series of respiration experiments where we assessed the difference in standard metabolic rate of California market squid, Doryteuthis opalescens, when respired in groups or individually, and discuss how our results compare with metabolic reduction recorded from similar studies in other taxa.
