Benthic–pelagic links and rocky intertidal communities: Bottom-up effects on top-down control?

Insight into the dependence of benthic communities on biological and physical processes in nearshore pelagic environments, long considered a “black box,” has eluded ecologists. In rocky intertidal communities at Oregon coastal sites 80 km apart, differences in abundance of sessile invertebrates, herbivores, carnivores, and macrophytes in the low zone were not readily explained by local scale differences in hydrodynamic or physical conditions (wave forces, surge flow, or air temperature during low tide). Field experiments employing predator and herbivore manipulations and prey transplants suggested top-down (predation, grazing) processes varied positively with bottom-up processes (growth of filter-feeders, prey recruitment), but the basis for these differences was unknown. Shore-based sampling revealed that between-site differences were associated with nearshore oceanographic conditions, including phytoplankton concentration and productivity, particulates, and water temperature during upwelling. Further, samples taken at 19 sites along 380 km of coastline suggested that the differences documented between two sites reflect broader scale gradients of phytoplankton concentration. Among several alternative explanations, a coastal hydrodynamics hypothesis, reflecting mesoscale (tens to hundreds of kilometers) variation in the interaction between offshore currents and winds and continental shelf bathymetry, was inferred to be the primary underlying cause. Satellite imagery and offshore chlorophyll-a samples are consistent with the postulated mechanism. Our results suggest that benthic community dynamics can be coupled to pelagic ecosystems by both trophic and transport linkages.

Disfacilitation and active inhibition in the neocortex during the natural sleep-wake cycle: An intracellular study

Earlier extracellular recordings during natural sleep have shown that, during slow-wave sleep (SWS), neocortical neurons display long-lasting periods of silence, whereas they are tonically active and discharge at higher rates during waking and sleep with rapid eye movements (REMs). We analyzed the nature of long-lasting periods of neuronal silence in SWS and the changes in firing rates related to ocular movements during REM sleep and waking using intracellular recordings from electrophysiologically identified neocortical neurons in nonanesthetized and nonparalyzed cats. We found that the silent periods during SWS are associated with neuronal hyperpolarizations, which are due to a mixture of K+ currents and disfacilitation processes. Conventional fast-spiking neurons (presumably local inhibitory interneurons) increased their firing rates during REMs and eye movements in waking. During REMs, the firing rates of regular-spiking neurons from associative areas decreased and intracellular traces revealed numerous, short-lasting, low-amplitude inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs), that were reversed after intracellular chloride infusion. In awake cats, regular-spiking neurons could either increase or decrease their firing rates during eye movements. The short-lasting IPSPs associated with eye movements were still present in waking; they preceded the spikes and affected their timing. We propose that there are two different forms of firing rate control: disfacilitation induces long-lasting periods of silence that occur spontaneously during SWS, whereas active inhibition, consisting of low-amplitude, short-lasting IPSPs, is prevalent during REMs and precisely controls the timing of action potentials in waking.