CAREER: Integrating thermal physiology and species interactions to forecast community response to environmental change

Understanding how marine life will respond to changing environmental conditions is critical for ocean management and the wellbeing of people that rely upon marine resources through fisheries. A key problem in this area is understanding how environmental change affects the way that species obtain food. Rising ocean temperatures may increase the food requirements of predatory animals which can cause prey populations to decline.

Alternatively, warming can cause multiple predators to compete and interfere with each other, reducing effects on prey. This CAREER project addresses this problem by focusing on abundant native and invasive predatory crabs and their consumption of prey blue mussels in the Gulf of Maine, which is among the fastest warming habitats on the planet. This project measures how temperature affects the physiology of the focal species and how they interact with each other using a series of laboratory experiments, then uses mathematical models to calculate the impacts of temperature on the relative abundance of predators and prey.

The educational components of this project include the formation of two working groups that pair early career scientists (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) with middle and late career mentors to train on team-based approaches to science. The investigator is developing data science workshops and laboratory modules to enhance undergraduate education.

Results of this research inform the management of marine resources such as shellfish and broadly contribute to our understanding of how marine life will respond to changing ocean conditions.

Predicting the ecological consequences of changing environmental conditions will require an understanding of how temperature affects species interactions such as predation and competition. Further complicating this endeavor is the fact that communities in nature are often composed of multiple interacting predators that can produce non-linear and complex effects on prey species and overall community composition.

This project 1) uses an integrated approach, combining single species physiological assays to compare the relative thermal performance of multiple predatory marine invertebrates (native and invasive) and prey blue mussels from the Gulf of Maine; 2) measures species interactions within the community using mesocosm experiments, quantifying temperature dependent predation, intraguild predation, and competition; and then 3) uses this information to construct numerical models to predict the effects of temperature on the biomass dynamics of both predators and prey.

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.