Abstract
Scaling experimentally derived effects of CO2 on marine fauna to population responses is critical for informing management about potential ecological ramifications of ocean acidification. We used an individual-based model of winter flounder to extrapolate laboratory-derived effects of elevated CO2 assumed for early life stages of fish to long-term population dynamics. An offspring module with detailed hourly to daily representations of spawning, growth, and mortality that incorporates potential elevated CO2 effects was linked to an annual time-step parent module. We calibrated the model using a 40 yr Reference simulation (1977-2016) that included gradual warming and then performed ‘Retrospective’ simulations that assumed a suite of elevated CO2 effects by changing fertilization rate, mortality rate of embryos due to developmental malformations, larval growth rate, and size-at-settlement. ‘Recovery’ simulations that started at low population size were then used to further explore possible interactions between the effects of CO2 and warming on population productivity. Warming had a major negative effect on the simulated winter flounder population abundance, and reduced larval growth had the largest single impact among the CO2 effects tested. When a combination of the assumed CO2 effects was imposed together, average annual recruitment and spawning stock biomass were reduced by half. In the Recovery simulations, inclusion of CO2 effects amplified the progressive decrease in population productivity with warming. Our analysis is speculative and a first step towards addressing the need for extrapolating from laboratory effects of ocean acidification to broader, ecologically relevant scales.
Highlights
Absorption of anthropogenic CO2 is projected to increase the acidification of ocean and coastal marine waters (Hartin et al 2016)
The individual-based model (IBM) approach has been suggested for ocean acidification (OA) effects modeling (Koenigstein et al 2016) and is widely used to simulate population dynamics of fish and other taxa (DeAngelis & Grimm 2014)
Our model built off an earlier IBM effort for winter flounder at the same location (Chambers et al 1995, Rose et al 1996, Tyler et al 1997) but was highly modified to include CO2 effects on fertilization, survival, growth, and size-atsettlement
Summary
Absorption of anthropogenic CO2 is projected to increase the acidification of ocean and coastal marine waters (Hartin et al 2016). The laboratory results for fish and other taxa have been mixed, with effects ranging from negative to none to positive (Harvey et al 2013, Cattano et al 2018) depending on Extrapolation of experimentally derived effects of CO2, and ocean acidification (OA) in general, to population-level responses in nature is difficult but important (Pankhurst & Munday 2011, Queirós et al 2015, Nagelkerken & Munday 2016). As is the case for biological effects studies of contaminants (Suter 2016), laboratory-based CO2 effects studies have provided valuable information describing how groups of individuals are affected under controlled conditions. Such data (e.g. larval growth rate) can be Publisher: Inter-Research · www.int-res.com. What is needed is a set of tools for moving laboratory-demonstrated effects closer to the ecologically relevant endpoints that align with the scale of resource management (Rose et al 2003, Townsend et al 2019)
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