In coastal environments, fishing and aquaculture may be important sources of disturbance to ecosystem functioning, the quantification of which must be assessed to make them more sustainable. In the Chausey Archipelago, France, recreational fishing and commercial shellfish farming are the only two evident anthropogenic activities, dominated by bivalve hand-raking and 'bouchot' mussel culture, re...

Climate variability and the rapid warming of seas undoubtedly have huge ramifications for biological processes such as reproduction. As such, gametogenesis and spawning were investigated at two sites over 200 km apart on the south coast of Ireland in an ecosystem engineer, the common cockle, Cerastoderma edule. Both sites are classed as Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), but are of different...

Concentrations of seven metals (Cd, Cu, Cr, Pb, Ni, Zn, Hg) were monitored monthly during 2 years in two bivalves, Cerastoderma edule and Scrobicularia plana collected from the Souss Estuary (South Morocco) before and after the commissioning of a sewage treatment plant in November 2002. According to trace metals, changes in concentrations were observed mainly in S. plana, characterised by a dec...

Carbon capture and storage is promoted as a mitigation method counteracting the increase of atmospheric CO2 levels. However, at this stage, environmental consequences of potential CO2 leakage from sub-seabed storage sites are still largely unknown. In a 3-month-long mesocosm experiment, this study assessed the impact of elevated pCO2 levels (1,500 to 24,400 μatm) on Cerastoderma edule dominated...

Two caging experiments were conducted on an intertidal mudflat to assess the impact of predation on two species of bivalves; Macoma balthica and Cerastoderma edule. The first caging 2 experiment enclosed the shore crab, Carcinus maenas, carapace width 15–25 mm, in 1-m cages. The three treatments were zero Carcinus (control), five Carcinus (the highest natural densities found at this site) and 2...

Short-term oxygen consumption and filtration rate experiments were conducted to evaluate the response of edible cockle Cerastoderma edule when infested by the Digenean trematod Labratrema minimus. In this experiment the metabolic activities of bivalves were measured to detennine this particular aspect of the host-parasite interaction. We have used the Bucephalidae digenea Labratrema minimus inf...

In Europe, mainly the Mediterranean region, intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides has been recorded over the past 30 years, exceeding, in some cases, the limits of contamination authorized by the European Union. The intensive use of pollutants in fields near ecological coastal wetlands has led to implementation of pesticide monitoring programs to recover aquatic systems such as the Mondeg...

In invertebrates, encapsulation is the common immune defence reaction towards foreign bodies, including multicellular parasites, which enter the haemocoel and are too large to be phagocytosed. This immune response has been most extensively studied in insects, in which it is highly complex, involving a diversity of cellular and molecular processes, but little is known of this process in bivalve ...

We present an ecophysiological model of the bivalve Cerastoderma edule that simulates individual growth and reproduction under ambient conditions in temperature and food availability in the Oosterschelde estuary, SW Netherlands. The model contains feedback loops in the uptake and metabolism of food and in the partitioning of carbon to the internal state variables: somatic tissue, storage, organ...