Lack of long-term acclimation in Antarctic encrusting species suggests vulnerability to warming

Melody S. Clark (), Leyre Villota Nieva, Joseph I. Hoffman, Andrew J. Davies, Urmi H. Trivedi, Frances Turner, Gail V. Ashton and Lloyd S. Peck
Additional contact information
Melody S. Clark: Natural Environment Research Council
Leyre Villota Nieva: Natural Environment Research Council
Joseph I. Hoffman: University of Bielefeld
Andrew J. Davies: University of Rhode Island, Department of Biological Sciences
Urmi H. Trivedi: The University of Edinburgh
Frances Turner: The University of Edinburgh
Gail V. Ashton: Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Lloyd S. Peck: Natural Environment Research Council

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Marine encrusting communities play vital roles in benthic ecosystems and have major economic implications with regards to biofouling. However, their ability to persist under projected warming scenarios remains poorly understood and is difficult to study under realistic conditions. Here, using heated settlement panel technologies, we show that after 18 months Antarctic encrusting communities do not acclimate to either +1 °C or +2 °C above ambient temperatures. There is significant up-regulation of the cellular stress response in warmed animals, their upper lethal temperatures decline with increasing ambient temperature and population genetic analyses show little evidence of differential survival of genotypes with treatment. By contrast, biofilm bacterial communities show no significant differences in community structure with temperature. Thus, metazoan and bacterial responses differ dramatically, suggesting that ecosystem responses to future climate change are likely to be far more complex than previously anticipated.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11348-w Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-11348-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11348-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().