Search for: All records

Anthropogenic climate change is projected to affect marine ecosystems by challenging the environmental tolerance of individuals. Marine fishes may be particularly vulnerable to emergent climate stressors during early life stages. Here we focus on embryos of Pacific herring(Clupea pallasii), an important forage fish species widely distributed across the North Pacific. Embryos were reared under a range of temperatures (10-16°C) crossed with twopCO₂levels (600 and 2000μatm) to investigate effects on metabolism and survival. We further tested how elevatedpCO₂affects critical thermal tolerance (CT_max) by challenging embryos to short-term temperature fluctuations. Experiments were repeated on embryos collected from winter and spring spawning populations to determine if spawning phenology corresponds with different limits of environmental tolerance in offspring. We found that embryos could withstand acute exposure to 20°C regardless of spawning population or incubation treatment, but that survival was greatly reduced after 2-3 hours at 25°C. We found thatpCO₂had limited effects onCT_max. The survival of embryos reared under chronically warm conditions (12°, 14°, or 16°C) was significantly lower relative to 10°C treatments in both populations. Oxygen consumption rates (MO₂) were also higher at elevated temperatures andpCO₂levels. However, heart contraction measurements made 48 hours afterCT_maxexposure revealed a greater increase in heart rate in embryos reared at 10°C compared to 16°C, suggesting acclimation at higher incubation temperatures. Our results indicate that Pacific herring are generally tolerant ofpCO₂but are vulnerable to acute temperature stress. Importantly, spring-spawning embryos did not clearly exhibit a higher tolerance to heat stress compared to winter offspring.

 

Northern sand lance (Ammodytes dubius) are essential forage fish in most offshore, temperate-to-polar waters on the Northwest Atlantic shelf (NWA), but their population structure and genetic separation from the American sand lance (A. americanus) remain unresolved. We assembled a reference genome for A. dubius (first in the Ammodytidae) and then used low-coverage whole genome sequencing on 262 specimens collected across the species distribution (Mid-Atlantic Bight to Greenland) to quantify genetic differentiation between geographic regions based on single nucleotide polymorphisms. We found strong separation between A. dubius from locations north and south of the Scotian Shelf, largely due to massive genetic differentiation spanning most of chromosomes 21 and 24. Genetic distance increased with geographic distance in the smaller southern cluster but not in the larger northern cluster, where genetic homogeneity appeared across large geographic distances (>103 km). The two genetic clusters coincide with a clear break in winter sea surface temperature, suggesting that differential offspring survival, rather than limited transport, causes a break in realized connectivity. Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA both clearly delineated A. dubius from A. americanus, thereby confirming a species boundary through spatial niche partitioning into inshore (A. americanus) and offshore (A. dubius) sand lance species on the NWA.

 

Abstract Experiments examining fish sensitivities to future oceanic CO2 levels have greatly expanded over past decades and identified many potentially affected traits. Curiously, data on reproductive trait responses to high CO2 are still scarce, despite their strong link to Darwinian fitness and thus to population vulnerability to ocean acidification. We conducted two rearing experiments on the first broadcast-spawning marine fish model (Atlantic silverside, Menidia menidia) to examine how long-term and novel whole life-cycle exposures to predicted future CO2 levels (∼2,000 µatm) affect laboratory spawning, temperature-specific reproductive investment, fecundity, and size distributions of maturing oocytes. At low temperatures (17°C), female body size and therefore potential fecundity (FPot, oocytes/female) slightly increased with CO2, while relative fecundity (FRel, oocytes/g female) remained unaffected. At high temperatures (24°C), high CO2 substantially reduced both FPot (−19%) and FRel (−28%) relative to control treatments. Irrespective of CO2, females at 24°C grew larger and heavier than those at 17°C, and although larger females produced larger oocytes at some developmental stages, they also had lower gonadosomatic indices and lower FRel. Our findings contrast with most previous studies and thus highlight the need to investigate reproductive impacts of increasing CO2 on multiple fish species with contrasting life history strategies. 

Abstract Coastal ecosystems experience substantial natural fluctuations in p CO 2 and dissolved oxygen (DO) conditions on diel, tidal, seasonal and interannual timescales. Rising carbon dioxide emissions and anthropogenic nutrient input are expected to increase these p CO 2 and DO cycles in severity and duration of acidification and hypoxia. How coastal marine organisms respond to natural p CO 2  × DO variability and future climate change remains largely unknown. Here, we assess the impact of static and cycling p CO 2  × DO conditions of various magnitudes and frequencies on early life survival and growth of an important coastal forage fish, Menidia menidia . Static low DO conditions severely decreased embryo survival, larval survival, time to 50% hatch, size at hatch and post-larval growth rates. Static elevated p CO 2 did not affect most response traits, however, a synergistic negative effect did occur on embryo survival under hypoxic conditions (3.0 mg L −1 ). Cycling p CO 2  × DO, however, reduced these negative effects of static conditions on all response traits with the magnitude of fluctuations influencing the extent of this reduction. This indicates that fluctuations in p CO 2 and DO may benefit coastal organisms by providing periodic physiological refuge from stressful conditions, which could promote species adaptability to climate change. 

Ocean acidification may impact the fitness of marine fish, however, studies reporting neutral to moderate effects have mostly performed short-term exposures to elevated CO2, whereas longer-term studies across life stages are still scarce. We performed a CO2 exposure experiment, in which a large number (n > 2200) of Atlantic silverside Menidia menidia offspring from wild spawners were reared for 135 days through their embryonic, larval, and juvenile stages under control (500 µatm) and high CO2 conditions (2300 µatm). Although survival was high across treatments, subtle but significant differences in length, weight, condition factor and fatty acid (FA) composition were observed. On average, fish from the acidified treatment were 4% shorter and weighed 6% less, but expressed a higher condition factor than control juveniles. In addition, the metrics of length and weight distributions differed significantly, with juveniles from the high CO2 treatment occupying more extreme size classes and the length distribution shifting to a positive kurtosis. Six of twenty-seven FAs differed significantly between treatments. Our results suggest that high CO2 conditions alter long-term growth in M. menidia, particularly in the absence of excess food. It remains to be shown whether and how these differences will impact fish populations in the wild facing size-selective predation and seasonally varying prey abundance.