Direct and Indirect Effects of Climate Change on Cymodocea Nodosa in the Canary Islands

Event Abstract Back to Event Direct and indirect effects of climate change on Cymodocea nodosa in the Canary Islands Adriana Rodríguez1*, Iago Peaguda1, Sergio Moreno-Borges1 and Alberto Brito1 1 Universidad de La Laguna, Spain Human activity is increasing at the rate of 0.4% yr-1, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is expected to double from preindustrial level by the middle of this century .Approximately 30% of CO2 emissions are absorbed by marine waters, therefore, marine species have to cope with increasing ocean acidification in combination with rising temperatures, causing a perturbation in a ecological component or system. Seagrass has been considered the most productive ecosystems worldwide, support high diversity, refuge and ecosystem engineers. However actually are exposed to multiple perturbations and different response species specific has been observed in different regions of world. The effects of climate change (warming and/or ocean acidification) has been tested on broad variety of seagrass (Tomas et al 2015; Jiménez-Ramos et al 2017), showing the effects of climate change on seagrass communities. How these changes affect seagrass and seagrass -herbivore interactions are on the main question for future seagrass research. In Canary Islands, Cymodocea nodosa play an important role in shore ecosystems (Reyes et al., 1995; Tuya et al 2014a, b). Various studies have reported a declining trend of Cymodocea meadows at Canary Islands (Tuya et al 2014a, b; Fabbri et al 2015), however any study has evaluated the effect of climate change on Cymodocea nodosa in Canary Islands. In this study we assessed the direct effects of climate change (temperature and acidification) on growth, net photosynthesis, respiration, chlorophyll a concentration and the indirect effects of climate change on herbivory of C. nodosa. In November of 2018 the segrass Cymodocea nodosa was randomly collected by scuba divers in the Abades locality, Tenerife Island. Plants were selected in the field and collected from different patches between 15-17 m deep. Plants were transported to laboratory in wet conditions. Upon arrival, 3-4 plant units were selected for healthy appearance and allocated to each of 60 transparent incubations beakers (1.3 L) containing natural sandy previously. Previous to the experiment, plants were acclimated for 7 days to laboratory conditions (salinity, light, temperature, ph). The plants were subjected to two pH treatments: control (pH=8.1) and low pH (pH=7.5) and two temperature treatments (control =21ºC and high=26ºC), following the predictions for next century in Canary Islands. The system consisted in two tanks of 300 L interconnected in each treatment; one tank was header tank where pH and temperature were adjusted although a CO2 injection system in low pH treatments and the temperature was adjusted although coolers and heaters. The other tank was the support where the beakers were placed. A total of 15 replicates were used per each treatment. Diverse variables were taken for growth, weight, maximum leaf length, total root length, number of leaves. These measures were taken prior to experiment and end to experiment in laboratory, following methodology of Hernán et al (2017). Net primary production and respiration rates were calculated following methodology used by Legrand et al (2017).The content of chlorophyll a was calculated according to Lichtenthaler and Wellburn (1983).The indirect effects were tested although feeding assays with Paracentrotus lividus for 48 hours at the end of experiment following methodology Rodríguez et al (2018). In order to assess the effects of climate change on species studied, increase in weight, maximum leaf length, total root length, number of leaves, chlorophyll-a content, net primary production and respiration the data were analyzed by means of two-way permutational ANOVA in each variable. In the case of consumption rates, the data were analysed by two-way ANCOVAs performed by permutations: In all analysis temperature (2 levels) and ph (2 levels) were used as fixed factors. Euclidean distances were used for all analysis of variance, and respective significant terms were examined posteriori pairwise comparisons by permutations (Anderson 2001). If there were not enough possible permutations for a reasonable test, corrected p-values were obtained with Monte Carlo random draws from the asymptotic permutation distribution. All statistical analyses were carried out using PRIMER 6 &PERMANOVA+ v. 1.0.1 software. Our results showed significative differences between pH treatments where in low pH we observed higher increase in weight than in pH control ( F= 6.447; p=0.011), Figure 1. However in any other variable of growth we found significative differences. The net primary production varied between pH treatments (F=11.842; p=0.001) where higher concentrations of O2 were registered in low pH than control pH and between temperature treatments (F= 16.559; p=0.0002) where in the control conditions were observed the highest concentrations of O2 Nevertheless, there were no differences in respiration or in chlorophyll a content between pH or temperature treatments. In feeding assays, significative differences were observed between pH treatments, where the highest consume rates were observed on plant reared under low pH (F=13.939; p= 0.0022) Our results show the negative effects of climate change on Cymodocea nodosa, where high temperature decrease the net primary production rate and low pH increase the growth and net production rate but however increase their vulnerability to consumption by sea urchin P. lividus. Therefore, it is expected that increase in temperature decrease the photosynthesis rate and low pH (acidification) will trigger an increase in the grazing of seagrass tissues. Additional research is required to better predict and address changes in secondary metabolites and nutritional contents, as change in seagrass palatability under different climate scenarios. Figure 1 Figure 2 Acknowledgements This study has benefited from the development of the MIMAR MAC/4.6.d/066 project (INTERREG MAC 2014-2020). Authors acknowledge to Sonia Fernández, Cristina Villanova, Beatriz Vinha, Martí Vilanova and Teresa Añón for their support in the laboratory experiment. References Fabbri F, Espino F, Herrera R., et al. 2015.Trends of the seagrass Cymodocea nodosa (Magnoliophyta) in the Canary Islands: Population changes in the last two decades. Scientia Marine 79(1):7 Hernán G, Ortega MJ, Gándara AM, Castejón I, et al.,2017. Future warmer seas: increased stress and susceptibility to grazing in seedlings of a marine habitat-forming species. Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13768. Jiménez-Ramos R, Egea LG, Ortega MJ, et al. 2017.Global and local disturbances interact to modify seagrass palatability. Plos One, 12(8): e0183256 Legrand E, Riera P, Lutier M et al., 2017. Species interactions can shift the response of a maerl bed community to ocean acidification and warming. Biogeosciences, 14:5359-5376. Lichtenthaler, H.K., Wellburn, A.R., 1983. Determination of total carotenoids and chlorophyll a and b of leaf extracts in different solvents. Biochem. Soc. Trans. 11, 591–592. Reyes J, Sansón M, Afonso-Carrillo J. 1995. Leaf phenology, growth and production of the seagrass Cymodocea nodosa at El Médano (South of Tenerife, Canary Islands). Bot. Mar. 38: 457-465. Rodríguez A, Hernández JC, Brito A, Clemente S.2018. Effects of ocean acidification on algae growth and feeding rates of juvenile sea urchins. Marine Environ. Res., 140:382-389. Tomas F., Martínez-Grego B, Hernán G, Santos R. 2015. Responses of seagrass to anthropogenic and natural disturbances do not equally translate to its consumers. Global Change Biology, 21:4021-4030. Tuya F, Ribeiro-Leite L, Arto-Cuesta N, et al. 2014a. Decadal changes in the structure of Cymodocea nodosa seagrass meadows: Natural vs. human influences. Est. Coast. Shelf Sci. 137: 41-49. Tuya F, Png-Gonzalez L, Riera R, et al. 2014b. Ecological structure and function differs between habitats dominated by seagrasses and green seaweeds. Marine Environ. Res. 98: 1-13 Keywords: Climate Change, Cymodocea nodosa, Direct effects, Indirect effects, Herbivory Conference: XX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM XX) , Braga, Portugal, 9 Sep - 12 Sep, 2019. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Global Change, Invasive Species and Conservation Citation: Rodríguez A, Peaguda I, Moreno-Borges S and Brito A (2019). Direct and indirect effects of climate change on Cymodocea nodosa in the Canary Islands. Front. Mar. Sci. Conference Abstract: XX Iberian Symposium on Marine Biology Studies (SIEBM XX) . doi: 10.3389/conf.fmars.2019.08.00145 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 04 Jun 2019; Published Online: 27 Sep 2019. * Correspondence: Dr. Adriana Rodríguez, Universidad de La Laguna, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain, adrianar@ull.edu.es Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. 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