Meeting Abstract
Ocean acidification (OA) poses a significant threat to calcifying invertebrates by negatively influencing shell deposition and growth in high pCO2 and low pH environments. Developmental responses to OA are often influenced by interactions between consecutive life history stages and between OA and additional environmental variables such as food availability. Effects of pH or pCO2 stress incurred during one life history stage can persist throughout proceeding stages. Abundant nutrition can buffer organismal responses of calcifying invertebrates to OA. Inversely, nutritional stress can function as a co-occurring stressor. It is plausible that the nature of such interactions between low pH and low nutrition changes as the life history of a calcifying invertebrate proceeds. We reared larvae and juveniles of the planktotrophic marine gastropod Crepidula fornicata through combined treatments of nutritional stress and low pH to monitor how multiple stressors endured during the larval stage affect juvenile performance. Shell growth responded non-linearly to decreasing seawater pH, significantly declining between pH 7.6 and pH 7.5. Deleterious effects from conditioning at pH 7.5 persisted across metamorphosis as a larval carry-over effect; juveniles that had been reared at pH 7.5 as larvae grew significantly slower than juveniles derived from pH 8.0 larval cultures. Larval conditioning at pH 7.6 reduced juvenile growth despite the absence of a negative impact on larval growth, demonstrating a latent effect. Optimal larval pH offset the impact of larval nutritional stress on competence for metamorphosis and offset carry-over effects of larval nutrition on juvenile growth, indicating the importance of interactions between OA and other stressors across life history transitions of marine invertebrates.
