The odd un-couple Hypoxia tolerance uncorrelated with acid tolerance in populations of Tigriopus californicus


SOCIETY FOR INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE BIOLOGY
2021 VIRTUAL ANNUAL MEETING (VAM)
January 3 – Febuary 28, 2021

Meeting Abstract


110-7  Sat Jan 2  The odd un-couple: Hypoxia tolerance uncorrelated with acid tolerance in populations of Tigriopus californicus Deconinck, AD*; Willett, CS; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill aimeed@live.unc.edu

Organisms living in the intertidal habitat must cope with co-occurring stressors as a result of daily fluctuations of exposure and submergence. Hypoxia (low oxygen) and low pH occur at the same time when the rate of photosynthesis is low and respiration is high, such as overnight. To test whether these correlated stressors resulted in correlated traits, we measured survival of adult Tigriopus californicus to acute hypoxia exposure or acute acid exposure. T. californicus copepods live in shallow pools of the high intertidal from Baja California to Alaska. Low levels of migration between populations has led to large differences in thermal tolerance at different latitudes. After testing copepods from 6 populations that spanned a wide latitudinal range, we found no correlation between hypoxia tolerance and acid tolerance at the population level, and further investigation into other predictors for stress tolerance such as sex, body length, and time since collection, were dissimilar for the two traits. Our results suggest that temporal correlation between hypoxia and low pH is less influential in driving coevolution of environmental stress tolerances than stressors that co-occur geographically.

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