2020 Volume 76 Issue 2 Pages I_846-I_851
The species of the genus Haustorioides (Amphipod) and Excirolana (Isopod), which are intertidal species inhabiting the surficial sediments of sandy beach, are distributed throughout the marginal seas of the Northwestern Pacific and the world’s oceans, respectively. Recently, it has been clarified that the geophysical environment represented by suction governs the distributions of H. japonicus and E. chiltoni. Against this background, in this study, we conducted field studies and an unified analysis to investigate whether there are universal linkages between the suction and the distributions of four Haustorioides species, namely H. japonicus, H. munsterhjelmi, H. koreanus, and H. nesogenes, and E. chiltoni, which occur in sandy beaches with different tidal ranges in Japan and Korea. The distributions of the four Haustorioides species and E. chiltoni were associated with particular suctions for the Haustorioides and Excirolana species. Namely, the four Haustorioides species and E. chiltoni became absent where suction exceeded about 2 kPa and 5 kPa, respectively, in all sandy beaches, despite more than 10-fold tidal range and its variations.
