| Bacteria are highly abundant and productive in intertidal mudflat sediments. By analogy with pelagic system, it has been suggested that bacteria play an important role in benthic food web. Due to technical difficulties, numbers of studies dealing with benthic bacterivory are not numerous and give conflicting results. A method using community of 15N enriched bacteria as tracer was developed in order to measure grazing of meiofauna and macrofauna. Since enriched bacteria present characteristics of size, activity and diversity close to natural ones, bias due to selective bacterial ingestion by grazers are limited. Due to tidal cycles, intertidal mudflat constitutes highly variable environment at short time scale. Since those variations may influence... |
