Evolutionary Fish Ecology

Hannes Baumann Featured paper Synposis

The ‘Evolutionary Fish Ecology’ Lab at the Department of Marine Sciences uses experimental, field, and modeling approaches to address the central question, how coastal marine organisms will cope with the simultaneous changes in their environment caused by global and regional human stressors, and how they are already adapted to environmental variability in e.g. temperature, oxygen, or pH.

Environmental changes include coastal pH, pCO₂, oxygen, and temperature, which are all projected to change with progressing global climate change and urbanization. Marine environments are also affected by size-selective fishing, which may alter the genotypic composition of commercial fish species. We utilize a widening suite of experimental, field, and modeling approaches, welcome undergraduate participation, and coordinate our efforts with local authorities working on issues of Long Island Sound.

Biology Letters published our latest study, a meta-analysis of 20 standard CO₂ exposure experiments conducted on Atlantic silverside offspring between 2012-2017. Years of sustained experimental work resulted in the most robustly constrained estimates of overall CO₂ effect sizes for a marine organism to date. The study showed:

A general tolerance of Atlantic silverside early life stages to pCO₂ levels of ~2,000 µatm

A significant overall CO₂ induced reduction of embryo and overall survival by -9% and -13%, respectively

The seasonal change in early life CO₂ sensitivity in this species

The value of serial experimentation to detect and robustly estimate CO₂ effects in marine organisms

Citation:
Baumann, H., Cross, E.L., and Murray, C.S. (2018) Robust quantification of fish early life CO₂ sensitivities via serial experimentation Biology Letters 14:20180408

By Jacob Snyder

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