Highlights
- Climate change is acidifying and warming oceans.
- Building resilience of marine species will be essential to ensure their persistence.
- Resilience to climate change in oysters was identified in a large-scale experiment as the capacity to defend acid-base balance and have a positive Scope for Growth.
- Only 8 of 24 genetically distinct family lines of this economically and ecologically important oyster species had resilience.
Abstract
Climate change is acidifying and warming our oceans, at an unprecedented rate posing a challenge for marine invertebrates vital across the globe for ecological services and food security. Here we show it is possible for resilience to climate change in an ecologically and economically significant oyster without detrimental effects to the energy budget. We exposed 24 pair-mated genetically distinct families of the Sydney rock oyster, Saccostrea glomerata to ocean acidification and warming for 4w and measured their resilience. Resilience was identified as the capacity to defend their acid-base balance without a loss of energy available for Scope for Growth (SFG). Of the 24 families, 13 were better able to defend their acid-base balance while eight had no loss of energy availability with a positive SFG. This study has found oyster families with reslience against climate change without a loss of SFG, is an essential mitigation strategy, in a critical mollusc.
Parker L. M., Scanes E., O’Connor W. A., Dove M., Elizur A., Pörtner H.-O. & Ross P. M., 2024. Resilience against the impacts of climate change in an ecologically and economically significant native oyster. Marine Pollution Bulletin 198: 115788. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115788. Article.
