Abstract

Despite the importance of jellyfish in marine ecosystems, many basic biological and ecological aspects remain understudied, especially in tropical regions. Here, we report on scyphozoan jellyfish distribution and ecology to the Amazon coast for the first time, adding the records of Chrysaora lactea, Lychnorhiza lucerna and Stomolophus fritillarius. We also review the records for the three species for the whole Brazilian coastline, describe temporal variability within an Amazon estuary and length–weight relationships. The three species displayed a widespread distribution on the Brazilian coast. In the studied estuary, the species are unevenly distributed throughout the year and their presence was not clearly correlated with environmental factors examined, although L. lucerna is more common during the dry season, as indicated by multivariate and correlation analysis. The length–weight relationships were significant for both L. lucerna (R² = 0.86, P < 0.0001) and S. fritillarius (R² = 0.75, P < 0.0001). Jellyfish variability is still unexplained within the estuary despite our 3-year sampling. These jellyfish may be more abundant during the dry season due to the retraction of the amazon plume, but additional sampling designs and methods are needed to test this hypothesis.

中文翻译：

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来自亚马逊沿岸的海鞘水母（Cnidaria，Medusozoa）：分布，时间变化和长度-重量关系

摘要

尽管水母在海洋生态系统中很重要，但许多基本的生物学和生态方面仍未得到研究，特别是在热带地区。在这里，我们首次报道了亚马逊河沿岸海鞘水母的分布和生态，并增加了Chrysaora lactea，Lychnorhiza lucerna和Stomolophus fritillarius的记录。。我们还回顾了整个巴西海岸线上这三个物种的记录，描述了亚马逊河口内的时间变异性和长度-重量关系。这三个物种在巴西海岸表现出广泛的分布。在研究的河口中，该物种全年分布不均，其存在与所检查的环境因素之间没有明显的相关性，尽管通过干燥和相关分析表明，在干燥季节，琉森湖更为常见。长度与体重的关系对于琉森乳杆菌（R ²  = 0.86，P  <0.0001）和贝母葡萄球菌（R ²  = 0.75，P  <0.0001）。尽管我们进行了3年采样，但河口内的水母变异性仍无法解释。由于亚马逊羽流的退缩，这些水母在干旱季节可能会更加丰富，但是需要更多的采样设计和方法来检验这一假设。