Tolerance and response of clams in Ria de Aveiro to salinity changes

• Autor(a) principal: Carregosa, Vanessa Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/13424
• topic: Biologia marinha; Salinidade - Ria de Aveiro (Portugal); Bivalves; Stresse oxidativo

Unlike the concern that has been growing in relation to the impacts of contamination in marine benthic populations, the responses of aquatic organisms to natural alterations, namely changes in salinity, have received little attention. In fact, salinity is one of the dominant environmental factors that most affect marine bivalves, limiting their spatial distribution in the environment. Tide combined with fresh water inputs, from rivers or heavy rainy periods, and extreme dry seasons can dramatically alter the salinity of water, causing alterations in the benthic populations, namely intertidal bivalves. Furthermore, salinity of a given environment will restrict the spatial distribution of the species, which is especially important when assessing the spread of an invasive species into a new environment. In order to understand how native (Venerupis decussata and Venerupis corrugata) and invasive (Venerupis philippinarum) clam species cope with salinity changes, physiological, biochemical and metabolomic patterns were investigated. The results obtained showed that V. decussata and V. philippinarum presented high mortality at low (0 and 7) but tolerate high (35 and 42) salinities. On the other hand, V. corrugata presented high mortality rates both at low (0 and 7) and high salinities (35 and 42). The quantification of Na and K content revealed that, along the salinity gradient, V. decussata was the species with higher ability to maintain the ionic homeostasis. The biochemical parameters also showed that V. decussata was the clam that best cope with salinity changes and V. corrugata was the most sensitive. Furthermore, the results obtained showed that clams under salinity stressful conditions can alter their biochemical mechanisms, such as increasing their antioxidant defences, to cope with the higher oxidative stress resulting from hypo and hypersaline conditions. Among the physiological and biochemical parameters analysed (glycogen, glucose and protein content; lipid peroxidation (LPO) levels, antioxidant enzymes activity; total, reduced and oxidized glutathione), superoxide dismutase (SOD), LPO and glutathione S-transferase (GST) showed to be useful biomarkers to assess salinity impacts in clams. The effects of salinity changes in the metabolic profile of the three species were also studied using 1H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of clam extracts. Multivariate analysis of the NMR spectra enabled metabolite changes to be observed in relation to clams exposure to different salinity concentrations. When exposed to low salinities, energy reserves of clams may be exhausted, increasing the osmotic imbalance, affecting the metabolic performance and increasing the oxidative stress. V. corrugata showed to be the most sensitive clam to salinity changes. The optimal salinity for V. decussata and V. philippinarum was between 21 and 28 and for V. corrugata was salinity 21. This study showed that changes in salinity have different impacts in native and invasive species