. The Biological bulletin. Biology; Zoology; Biology; Marine Biology. FEEDING OF STARFISH LARVAE 93 amount of such clumped material was also seen in original FLC solutions. Thus larvae were probably ingesting clumped material rather than individual cells. The rates of ingestion and clearance of all FLC except Tetraselmis sp. by larvae at the late bipinnaria and early and late brachiolaria stages are shown in Figures 3-5. In all experiments, the ingestion rate increased linearly with FLC concentration and there was no evidence of satu- ration of ingestion rates. The 95% confidence bands of the
. The Biological bulletin. Biology; Zoology; Biology; Marine Biology. FEEDING OF STARFISH LARVAE 93 amount of such clumped material was also seen in original FLC solutions. Thus larvae were probably ingesting clumped material rather than individual cells. The rates of ingestion and clearance of all FLC except Tetraselmis sp. by larvae at the late bipinnaria and early and late brachiolaria stages are shown in Figures 3-5. In all experiments, the ingestion rate increased linearly with FLC concentration and there was no evidence of satu- ration of ingestion rates. The 95% confidence bands of the regression line, although not shown, covered the origin. Thus the clearance rate remained constant over the range of FLC concentrations tested. The clearance rate of larvae increased by almost two orders of magnitude as the ESD of FLC increased from 1 to 5 JJITI (Fig. 6). The clearance rate also increased with larval age: from the late bipinnaria to the late brachiolaria stage, the rate increased by 120% for P. tricornutum, 80% for D. tertiolecta, 50% for the small cyanobacteria strain. and 70% for cyanobacteria ACMM326. Discussion Feasibility of the FLC technique The FLC technique demonstrates both strengths and weaknesses when applied to the feeding of asteroid larvae. With larger food particles, the usefulness of the method is limited, as suggested by the selective ingestion of FLC over living cells of Tetraselmis sp. by COTS larvae. For ultraplankton-sized algae, however, this technique has an obvious advantage over the conventional cell counting method. Generally, the feeding rate of zooplankton is de- termined by measuring the change in cell concentration during incubations (Frost, 1972). This method, because of the low precision and accuracy of cell counting, is in- adequate to detect small changes in cell concentration and thus cannot be used for determining the feeding rate of individuals. This problem is particularly serious for small-sized algae, making it impossible
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