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Refuge trifecta: intertidal gastropods use pits to escape heat, wave action and predation

Joel W. Q. Tan,Janine Ledet,Peter A. Todd

Published 2025 in Oikos

ABSTRACT

Refuges play a critical role in ecology and evolution. In hard intertidal shores, small pits attract benthic invertebrates such as gastropods, however, there exists little mechanistic understanding of the processes driving the active usage of these microhabitat features. We conducted a series of laboratory experiments to assess whether the marine snail Nerita undata utilizes pits in concrete tiles as refuges when subjected to simulations of three primary environmental stressors, i.e. temperature, wave action, and predation. The results showed that the fractional time spent in pits (FTpits) was significantly higher when nerites were exposed to stressors compared to when they were absent, indicating that N. undata actively uses artificial pit microhabitats as refuge from temperature, wave action, and predation stress. No difference in FTpits was found between nerites placed on top‐surface heated tiles and those placed on homogenously heated tiles, suggesting that the active selection of pits by heat‐stressed N. undata was partly attributed to an ability to associate other non‐thermal properties of pits (e.g. physical structure) with thermal refuge. These results represent empirical validation to previous field‐studies that have made inferences from observations of natural rocky shores and suggest that refuge seeking organisms respond to not only the microenvironment shaped by topographic features but also to the architectural components of topography themselves. Our findings enable a more nuanced understanding of how site‐specific stress intensities corresponding with the diel‐tidal cycle influence pit refuge utilization patterns and provides evidence that pits serve as a universal refuge for multiple environmental stressors.

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