The last of the oysters
It is always satisfying when I get to see my scientific findings in print, and today is one of those days. The last of the papers I wrote about oyster larvae swimming behavior as a post-doc has been published in Marine Ecology Progress Series. The paper reflects a group effort that I only came into towards the end. The study was designed by my postdoc advisor, Lauren Mullineaux, and her collaborators, and the data were collected by two different summer interns. I helped out with the second run of the experiment, including picking up oyster larvae from a hatchery and observing their swimming behavior, and then I was tasked with analyzing the data.
Our findings are pretty cool. We exposed larvae to filtered seawater (as a control) and a chemical settlement cue from adult oysters at both ambient pH and a lower pH level predicted for the surface ocean in 2100. (If you don't know about ocean acidification, I recommend you read this.) Low pH has been shown to affect larval development in species like oysters that have calcium carbonate shells, but we wanted to see if low pH would affect the swimming behavior of larvae when they're settling. Would low pH prevent them from detecting, interpreting, or responding to the chemical settlement cue?
Turns out it doesn't - or at least not in any consistent way. The larvae still swam as they normally would in the filtered seawater control, and they still responded to the chemical cue by swimming or sinking to the bottom. Of course there was some variation in our data (there is always variation when you're dealing with live animals), but the overall message was clear: no consistent effect.
So take heart, my friends! Oyster larvae swimming behavior is one thing not strongly affected by ocean acidification!
Read the full paper here: https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v623/p13-24/
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| Oyster larvae, photographed at 10x magnification under a dissecting microscope. Photo by Erin Houlihan. |
Our findings are pretty cool. We exposed larvae to filtered seawater (as a control) and a chemical settlement cue from adult oysters at both ambient pH and a lower pH level predicted for the surface ocean in 2100. (If you don't know about ocean acidification, I recommend you read this.) Low pH has been shown to affect larval development in species like oysters that have calcium carbonate shells, but we wanted to see if low pH would affect the swimming behavior of larvae when they're settling. Would low pH prevent them from detecting, interpreting, or responding to the chemical settlement cue?
Turns out it doesn't - or at least not in any consistent way. The larvae still swam as they normally would in the filtered seawater control, and they still responded to the chemical cue by swimming or sinking to the bottom. Of course there was some variation in our data (there is always variation when you're dealing with live animals), but the overall message was clear: no consistent effect.
So take heart, my friends! Oyster larvae swimming behavior is one thing not strongly affected by ocean acidification!
Read the full paper here: https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v623/p13-24/
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