Abstract
Current concerns about climate change have led to intensive research attempting to understand how climate-driven stressors affect the performance of organisms, in particular the offspring of many invertebrates and fishes. Although stressors are likely to act on several stages of the life cycle, little is known about their action across life phases, for instance how multiple stressors experienced simultaneously in the maternal environment can modulate the responses to the same stressors operating in the offspring environment. Here, we study how performance of offspring of a marine invertebrate (shore crab Carcinus maenas) changes in response to two stressors (temperature and salinity) experienced during embryogenesis in brooding mothers from different seasons. On average, offspring responses were antagonistic: high temperature mitigated the negative effects of low salinity on survival. However, the magnitude of the response was modulated by the temperature and salinity conditions experienced by egg-carrying mothers. Performance also varied among cohorts, perhaps reflecting genetic variation, and/or maternal conditions prior to embryogenesis. This study contributes towards the understanding of how anthropogenic modification of the maternal environment drives offspring performance in brooders.
Highlights
Current and future estimates of climate-related changes in the marine environment have emphasized the necessity to understand the importance of multiple-driver effects on organisms, populations, communities and ecosystems [1,2,3,4]
We found that postzygotic maternal effects can modulate performance of offspring of the shore crab C. maenas in response to salinity and temperature, and that such responses vary among seasonal cohorts
The main response was observed in terms of survival, where we found further evidence for a thermal mitigation of low salinity stress (TMLS [36]), extended to our local population of the Irish Sea
Summary
Current and future estimates of climate-related changes in the marine environment have emphasized the necessity to understand the importance of multiple-driver (or stressor) effects on organisms, populations, communities and ecosystems [1,2,3,4]. Females carrying eggs at early stages of development (i.e. at the initiation of the formation of the embryo) were distributed at random into four treatments consisting of two temperatures (15°C and 18°C) and two salinities (diluted seawater: 25 practical salinity units (PSU) and seawater: 35 PSU; salinity is expressed in PSU, equivalent to ppt, following standard convention in oceanography) Those treatment combinations represent suboptimal (moderate osmotic and thermal stress) and optimal conditions (electronic supplementary material, figure S1); preliminary experiments, using females from the same population, revealed that hatching of viable larvae was still possible at 15°C and a salinity of 25 PSU. Model selection was applied in two steps: (i) on the random structure (i.e. variance heterogeneity and effects of female of origin, interacting with larval salinity and temperature) using the restricted maximum-likelihood method (REML); (ii) on the fixed structure (i.e. effects of season, embryonic and larval salinity and temperature) through maximum likelihood (ML)
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