Highlights
- Climate change and ocean acidification affect reproductive health of sea urchins.
- Larvae ability to cope with copper deteriorated in the past 20 years.
- Contribution of CO2, pH and temperature worsened in the past 7 years.
Abstract
The Mediterranean Sea represents a natural laboratory to infer the possible impacts of climate change and ocean acidification. In this article, we report the deteriorating ability of sea urchin larvae (Paracentrotus lividus) to cope with toxicity of a reference contaminant (Cu EC50) over the past 20 years and assessed the influence of 5 environmental factors from satellite measurements. This timeframe was divided in before and after January 2016 (46.57 μg/L vs 28.56 μg/L respectively, p < 0.001). In the second subset of data, correlation of the biological variable with CO2 and pH strengthened compared to the first part (rCO2-EC50: −0.21 vs −0.83 and rpH-EC50: 0.25 vs 0.87 respectively), with a causal link starting from one year and ending 4 months prior to EC50 measurements. Considering the continuous increase in CO2 concentrations recorded recently, this study could reveal a rapid deterioration of the health condition of this population of sea urchins in a coastal ecosystem.
Sartori D., Scatena G., Vrinceanu C. A. & Gaion A., 2023. Increased sensitivity of sea urchin larvae to metal toxicity as a consequence of the past two decades of climate change and ocean acidification in the Mediterranean Sea. Marine Pollution Bulletin 194(A): 115274. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115274. Article (subscription required).
