Trophic structure and energy flow of the resettled maritime area of the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh through ECOPATH

• DOI: 10.1007/s13131-019-1423-5
• Publication Date: 2019-10-16T07:03:03Z
• Authors: Ehsanul Karim; Qun Liu; Ying Xue; Shanur Jahedul Hasan; M. Enamul Hoq; Yahia Mahmud
• Keywords: 14. Life underwater; 15. Life on land; 01 natural sciences; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

The existing study was taken to represent the current information in order to develop a mass-balanced ecosystem model within the resettled maritime boundary area of the Bay of Bengal (BoB), Bangladesh from July 2016 to June 2017 through ECOPATH approach covering over 90 000 km2. A total of 19 functional groups were considered representing all trophic levels in the foodweb where estimated trophic interactions between the groups were varied from 1 (primary producers and detritus) to 3.45 (sharks). The ecotrophic efficiency (EE) of most of the consumers was greater than 0.80; symbolizing a largely exploited ecosystem and high energy transfer from lower to higher trophic levels. Moreover, the gross efficiency (0.001 8) and transfer efficiency (11.12%) of the whole system symbolizes the “Developing Systems” with somewhat maturity currently. Ecosystem’s overhead (64.6) and ascendancy (35.4) also designate the ecosystem’s stability. Thus, this study determines that the resettled maritime area of BoB reserves significant backup strength to face stress situations having capacity to rapid restoration to the original states.