Investigating mechanisms underlying adaptive capacity to ocean warming

Understanding how marine life copes with drastically different environmental conditions now and into the future is essential for the management and conservation of biodiversity in the ocean. One complicating factor is the observation that populations within a given species are often fine-tuned to the environment that they live in. Yet, it is often unclear what components of the environment create these differences across populations.

This project focuses on Atlantic oyster drills, a predatory snail that consumes farmed and wild oysters on the Atlantic coast of North America, the location of one of the strongest temperature gradients in the world. The investigators combine field and laboratory studies to understand how differences in temperature affect the growth and survival of oyster drills sourced from populations throughout their range.

This information is paired with molecular analyses to help determine genetic and physiological differences among populations. In addition to benefitting oyster reefs, this information broadly contributes to the understanding of how marine life will respond to rapidly changing environmental conditions. The project also supports the education and marine science training of students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral level.

In partnership with the non-profit organization Waterstrong, the investigators will provide marine science and swimming skills training to thirty girls from historically underrepresented groups.

Predicting how marine communities will respond to rapid environmental change is difficult because species responses can vary across populations and because organisms may evolve over time. Knowledge of how such evolutionary potential arises and is maintained is limited. A useful approach for examining species response to environmental change is to investigate how species have locally adapted to environmental differences across their range.

This project tests competing mechanisms that can generate countergradient variation (CnGV; a widespread form of local adaptation) in an ecologically important marine species (Atlantic oyster drill, Urosalpinx cinerea). The objectives of this integrative research are to 1) quantify the strength of seasonality and mean temperature in generating CnGV and to 2) identify if these responses are correlated across biological traits using a combination of field sampling and common garden experimentation.

These objectives are complemented with a molecular approach that 3) quantifies neutral genetic structure across populations and 4) identifies the roles of genetic adaptation and transcriptional plasticity in facilitating physiological adaptation to environmental change. The proposed work is significant because it provides a novel test for different environmental drivers of a commonly observed form of local adaptation.

This research also reveals the genetic underpinnings of how such local adaptation arises and will give insight into the adaptive capacity of organisms to rapid change.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.