The behavior of the shore crab Hemigrapsus oregonensis was assessed
with and without exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (Aroclor 1260).
After describing the crab's behavioral repertoire, activity budgets were
developed from observations of the time crabs spent in 20 categories of
shelter use, posture, and activity while held in habitat replicas with
sinusoidal tides of 12.4 hours.
Without PCBs exposure female crabs spent more time sheltered and
feeding but less time displaying than males. The sexes also differed in
the kinds of displays given. For both sexes certain activities prevailed
at certain tidal stages.
Crabs readily accumulated PCBs from contaminated sand. Whole body
burdens reached as high as 190 ppm PCBs and were related to sex and time
spent in feeding.
In two experiments the primary effect of PCBs exposure upon the
activity budgets of both sexes was to decrease the time spent in pre-feeding
and feeding behaviors. When given a variety of food types in a
third experiment, crabs under exposure shifted from feeding upon PCBs-contaminated
sand to uncontaminated food. By changing its feeding
behavior Hemigrapsus oregonensis actively reduced the received dose of
PCBs and its presumed adverse effects from what they would otherwise
have been. / Graduation date: 1977
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/28795 |
| Date | 25 February 1977 |
| Creators | Pearson, Walter H. |
| Contributors | Holton, Robert L. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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