Dataset Information

Drift in ocean currents impacts intergenerational microbial exposure to temperature.

ABSTRACT: Microbes are the foundation of marine ecosystems [Falkowski PG, Fenchel T, Delong EF (2008) Science 320(5879):1034-1039]. Until now, the analytical framework for understanding the implications of ocean warming on microbes has not considered thermal exposure during transport in dynamic seascapes, implying that our current view of change for these critical organisms may be inaccurate. Here we show that upper-ocean microbes experience along-trajectory temperature variability up to 10 °C greater than seasonal fluctuations estimated in a static frame, and that this variability depends strongly on location. These findings demonstrate that drift in ocean currents can increase the thermal exposure of microbes and suggests that microbial populations with broad thermal tolerance will survive transport to distant regions of the ocean and invade new habitats. Our findings also suggest that advection has the capacity to influence microbial community assemblies, such that regions with strong currents and large thermal fluctuations select for communities with greatest plasticity and evolvability, and communities with narrow thermal performance are found where ocean currents are weak or along-trajectory temperature variation is low. Given that fluctuating environments select for individual plasticity in microbial lineages, and that physiological plasticity of ancestors can predict the magnitude of evolutionary responses of subsequent generations to environmental change [Schaum CE, Collins S (2014) Proc Biol Soc 281(1793):20141486], our findings suggest that microbial populations in the sub-Antarctic (?40°S), North Pacific, and North Atlantic will have the most capacity to adapt to contemporary ocean warming.

SUBMITTER: Doblin MA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4878470 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Drift in ocean currents impacts intergenerational microbial exposure to temperature.

Doblin Martina A MA van Sebille Erik E

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20160502 20

Microbes are the foundation of marine ecosystems [Falkowski PG, Fenchel T, Delong EF (2008) Science 320(5879):1034-1039]. Until now, the analytical framework for understanding the implications of ocean warming on microbes has not considered thermal exposure during transport in dynamic seascapes, implying that our current view of change for these critical organisms may be inaccurate. Here we show that upper-ocean microbes experience along-trajectory temperature variability up to 10 °C greater tha ...[more]

PMID: 27140608

Similar Datasets

Project description:Current climate change models predict an increase in temperature variability and extreme events such as heatwaves, and organisms need to cope with consequent changes to environmental variation. Non-genetic inheritance mechanisms can enable parental generations to prime their offspring's abilities to acclimate to environmental change-but they may also be deleterious. When parents are exposed to predictable environments, intergenerational plasticity can lead to better offspring trait performance in matching environments. Alternatively, parents exposed to variable or unpredictable environments may use plastic bet-hedging strategies to adjust the phenotypic variance among offspring. Here, we used a model species, the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), to test whether putatively adaptive intergenerational effects can occur in response to shifts in environmental variation as well as to shifts in environmental mean, and whether parents employ plastic bet-hedging strategies in response to increasing environmental variation. We used a full-factorial, split-clutch experiment with parents and offspring exposed to three temperature regimes: constant, natural variation, and increased variation. We show that within-generation exposure to increased temperature variation reduces growth of offspring, but having parents that were exposed to natural temperature variation during gametogenesis may offset some early-life negative growth effects. However, these mitigating intergenerational effects do not appear to persist later in life. We found no indication that stickleback mothers plastically altered offspring phenotypic variance (egg size or clutch size) in response to temperature variation. However, lower inter-individual variance of juvenile fish morphology in offspring of increased variation parents may imply the presence of conservative bet-hedging strategies in natural populations. Overall, in our experiment, parental exposure to temperature variation had limited effects on offspring fitness-related traits. Natural levels of environmental variation promoted a potentially adaptive intergenerational response in early life development, but under more challenging conditions associated with increased environmental variation, the effect was lost.

Dataset Information

Drift in ocean currents impacts intergenerational microbial exposure to temperature.

Publications

Drift in ocean currents impacts intergenerational microbial exposure to temperature.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets