Chapter five - Interactive effects of ocean acidification and other environmental factors on marine organisms

Abstract

In recent decades, the marine environment has been seriously affected by various anthropogenic activities (e.g., deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, and disordered discharges of pollutants). As a consequence, a range of changes in seawater environmental factors have taken place in oceans around the world, including increased temperature, reduced pH and dissolved oxygen, salinity fluctuation, and many other anomalous alterations in environmental factors, and these changes have aroused concerns from scientists. It has been widely reported that these changes in environmental factors would impact marine organisms severely. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the environmental stressors mentioned above are rarely occurring independently in nature. Thus marine organisms are usually threatened by many different environmental stressors, and there would be complex and unpredicted interactions among the stressors. Generally, the interactive effects varied among additive (total effect equal to the sum of individual effects), synergistic (total effect greater than the sum of individual effects), or antagonistic (total effect less than the sum of individual effects), depending on the species and life stages of the studied organism, and the nature of the stressors themselves. It is necessary to figure out the interactive effects among various environmental stressors on specific marine organisms to accurately predict their physiological states and population dynamics under future climate scenarios. Therefore in this chapter, we summarize the related experiments in the last 20 years to discuss the interactive effects of ocean acidification (OA) combined with four other typical environmental stressors, namely ocean warming, hypoxia, salinity fluctuation, and heavy metal pollution, on marine organisms according to previously published studies. The authors hope that the contents of this chapter provide some basic information about the interactive effects of OA and the other four environmental factors for readers who are interested in this subject area.