"Enabled by the privilege of sabbatical freedom and fantastic collaborators in Chile, we can now pursue further integrative experimental work on principles of adaption across spatial climate gradients.

At its face, this project is about a replicated Common Garden Experiment with Chilean silversides (Odontesthes regia). But it is also more than that, because we use methods and approaches consistent with such work on northern hemisphere Atlantic and Pacific silversides (e.g., Conover & Present 1990; Baumann et al. 2011).

We therefore hope that our findings will lead to a higher level of integration, because for the first time we will compare adaptation patterns across three major latitudinal climate gradients on earth.

Our main question is therefore not whether Chilean silversides display local adaptation across latitudes, but what form it takes and how its strength likely scales with the strength of the underlying climate gradient."

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From the start, Mauricio has been an ever upbeat and optimistic partner in this project. In just a short amount of time, he became the most invaluable collaborator and friend. Without his enthusiastic support, none of this could have happened.

At the Universidad de Concepción, Mauricio works within the Zoology department where he leads the Comparative Animal Physiology Lab that specializes in physiological measurements (e.g., metabolism) in a variety of invertebrate and vertebrate organisms.

Mauricio Urbina Foneron
PhD. Animal Physiology. University of Canterbury. New Zealand, 2013
https://urbinanimalab.wordpress.com/

Dr. Cristian Gallardo-Escárate is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Aquaculture Research (INCAR) and also the leader of the Laboratory of Biotechnology and Aquatic Genomics at the Center of Biotechnology of the University of Concepcion.

INCAR's facilities at the Dichato Marine Station will house our experiments, to which Cristian brings a whole new set of molecular interests and tools. Welcome to team pejerrey, Cristian!

Check out Cristians career and productivity: ORCID | Web of Science | LOOP

How organisms adapt to climate gradients in space and time is a fundamental question for humanity and therefore a central funding objective for NSFs BIO and BIO-OCE programs.

This proposal advances understanding of two forms of local adaptation: co-gradient variation (CoGV) and counter-gradient variation (CnGV), which underlie adaptation to large-scale, latitudinal climate gradients. Both have been extensively studied in northern hemisphere silverside fishes (Atherinopsidae), but whether they also hold for southern hemisphere silversides and whether they scale with the strength of the underlying climate gradient is unknown.

The proposal will fund a comprehensive, replicated common garden experiment with the Chilean silverside Odontesthes regia; to be conducted at the Dichato Marine Station at University of Concepción. Specifically, the experiment will rear newly fertilized offspring obtained from wild founders at four locations along the Chilean coast (20 - 43°S) in triplicates at four common temperatures (10 - 22°C) to a common juvenile size.

Trait measurements of growth capacity, vertebral number, and total mercury concentration will show whether thermal reaction norms show evidence of CnGV in growth capacity and CoGV in vertebral number. These data will then be integrated into the existing empirical evidence for northern hemisphere silversides. If the latitudinal strength of thermal reaction norms varies as predicted, it will allow deriving a novel relationship between gradient strength and adaptation strength.

If such a relationship exists, it would be transformative, because it would allow scaling the strength of thermal reaction norm evolution to the degree of temperature change in space and – by inference - time. ‘Space-for-time’ analogues are one important approach to better understand how organisms and their traits may evolve under global climate change.