Abstract
For aquatic breathers, hypoxia and warming can act synergistically causing a mismatch between oxygen supply (reduced by hypoxia) and oxygen demand (increased by warming). The vulnerability of these species to such interactive effects may differ during ontogeny due to differing gas exchange systems. This study examines respiratory responses to temperature and hypoxia across four life-stages of the intertidal porcelain crab Petrolisthes laevigatus. Eggs, megalopae, juveniles and adults were exposed to combinations of temperatures from 6 to 18 °C and oxygen tensions from 2 to 21 kPa. Metabolic rates differed strongly across life-stages which could be partly attributed to differences in body mass. However, eggs exhibited significantly lower metabolic rates than predicted for their body mass. For the other three stages, metabolic rates scaled with a mass exponent of 0.89. Mass scaling exponents were similar across all temperatures, but were significantly influenced by oxygen tension (the highest at 9 and 14 kPa, and the lowest at 2 kPa). Respiratory responses across gradients of oxygen tension were used to calculate the response to hypoxia, whereby eggs, megalopae and juveniles responded as oxyconformers and adults as oxyregulators. The thermal sensitivity of the metabolic rates (Q10) were dependent on the oxygen tension in megalopae, and also on the interaction between oxygen tension and temperature intervals in adults. Our results thus provide evidence on how the oxygen tension can modulate the mass dependence of metabolic rates and demonstrate changes in respiratory control from eggs to adults. In light of our results indicating that adults show a good capacity for maintaining metabolism independent of oxygen tension, our study highlights the importance of assessing responses to multiple stressors across different life-stages to determine how vulnerability to warming and hypoxia changes during development.
Highlights
Water temperature notably affects the balance between oxygen supply and demand in aquatic ectotherms (Verberk et al 2011)
Log-transformed metabolic rates were strongly related to the log-transformed body mass of Petrolisthes laevigatus scaling positively with an overall exponent of 1.05 ± 0.02, i.e. near isometric scaling (Fig. 2a)
Metabolic rate scaled with body mass allometrically (0.89 ± 0.01) for the remaining
Summary
Water temperature notably affects the balance between oxygen supply and demand in aquatic ectotherms (Verberk et al 2011). An oxygen perspective may be useful to explain thermal responses in metabolism, body size and differences in species richness across thermal clines as well as the vulnerability of ectotherms to global warming (Van Dijk et al 1999; Verberk et al 2011; Verberk and Bilton 2013; Horne et al 2015). Thermal effects are largely inescapable for aquatic ectotherms, because the thermal conductivity of water is high and physiological processes at all levels of biological organization are impacted by temperature (Hochachka and Somero 2002; Tattersall et al 2012). It is imperative to apply a quantitative method that covers these different responses (oxyregulators, oxyconformers and hypoxia sensitive) to provide a flexible representation of the inherent causes of variation in metabolic rates (Alexander and McMahon 2004; Mueller and Seymour 2011)
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