Meeting Abstract
Bivalves are some of the most important suspension feeders in aquatic systems. Adult bivalves pump water with cilia on the ctenidia (gills) and capture particle on the gills. Adults are highly selective in the algae they remove from the water column. Recent work has shown that selectivity on the gills depends on passive mechanisms resulting from the interactions between physicochemical properties of algae and the mucus of individual species of bivalves. Larvae of bivalve do not have gills, and instead use crowns of large cilia, on the velum, for both locomotion and feeding. We conducted experiments to determine whether similar properties of algae are important for particle selection for feeding as for adults. We found that larvae of different species of bivalves feed at different rates on different species of algae when presented alone as well as in combination with other algae. In some cases, there were differences in the algae or particle consumed by the larvae, independent of size. We also found that in some cases larval feeding preferences changed through ontogeny, suggesting that the mechanisms for food selection are different than for adults.
