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.
Highlights
Marine encrusting communities play vital roles in benthic ecosystems and have major economic implications with regards to biofouling
The cellular responses to warming of the endemic biota on the heated panels were analysed via RNA-Seq expression profiling of the spirorbid (P. stalagmia)
Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analyses were performed to identify if specific metabolic pathways or functional groups were preferentially expressed in a particular treatment. These analyses showed significant enrichment below the threshold of the false discovery rate (FDR) of 0.05 for only the control versus +2 comparison, which meant that these processes were up-regulated and enriched in the +2 samples
Summary
Marine encrusting communities play vital roles in benthic ecosystems and have major economic implications with regards to biofouling. There is a major interest in how this community will perform under future climate change scenarios Such evaluations are possible on encrusting (filter feeding) species due to the recent development of in situ heated settlement panels[8]. This technology enables us to heat the thin surface layer of water (up to 5 mm) above the panels to +1 and +2 °C above ambient temperature, matching the 50 and 100 years predictions for warming in the Southern Ocean respectively[9]. Given the changing bloom conditions, filter feeders are more likely to be affected in the near future compared to nonfilter feeding species (detritivores, carnivores etc) and are useful indicator species for the effects of climate change
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