H. Baumann presented the Master thesis work of Elizabeth Depasquale about individual and concurrent effects of low pH and low oxygen conditions on larval forage fish species at two international conferences. The talk highlighted the novel findings of the study, i.e.: (1) that sensitivities to combined stressors are species- and trait-specific, (2), that larval fish overall seem to be less tolerant of low oxygen than low pH condition, but that (3) the combined effects can be additive and even synergistic; hence suggesting that focussing only on hypoxia in urbanized, eutrophied coastal waters may considerably underestimate the negative effects on larval fish. Even though hypoxia and acidification are almost always coupled conditions in marine environments, the empirical database on such multistressor experiments is still very small and thus precludes robust conclusions and generalizations across taxa or ecosystems.

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Depasquale, E., Baumann, H., and Gobler, C.J. (2015) Variation in early life stage vulnerability among Northwest Atlantic estuarine forage fish to ocean acidification and low oxygen. Marine Ecology Progress Series 523: 145–156