The effects of upwelling-driven hypoxia on sea urchins in California current kelp forests
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Global climate change is increasingly exposing marine organisms, communities, and ecosystems to a variety of physiologically stressful conditions. Understanding how organisms respond to realistic exposures to physiological stressors, and how these responses may scale up to population- and ecosystem-level impacts, is crucial to understanding and predicting the impacts of climate change. Most earlier experimental approaches to this problem have focused on assessing organism responses to constant levels of a single physiological stressor, but physiological stresses on marine organisms often occur at sublethal levels, with temporally variable exposure patterns, and in combination with other stressors. In this dissertation, I use sea urchins in California Current kelp forests as a model system to address questions about the roles of sublethal exposures, temporal exposure patterns, and multiple-stressor interactions in shaping organisms' and ecosystems' responses to upwelling-driven coastal hypoxia. By using a decade-long dataset of nearshore dissolved oxygen conditions from the Monterey Bay kelp forest as a basis for designing and interpreting laboratory experiments, I find that coastal hypoxia is most likely to impact kelp forest ecosystems via sublethal effects on the ecological roles of sea urchins, that longer-term patterns of exposure to sublethal hypoxia have potential impacts on sea urchin populations and kelp forest ecosystems, and that realistic combinations of multiple stressors produce interactive and unexpected responses in sea urchins. Taken together, the results of this dissertation suggest that sublethal exposures, temporal exposure patterns, and multiple-stressor interactions all modulate individual sea urchin responses to upwelling-driven hypoxia, with potential consequences for populations and ecosystems. More broadly, the results indicate that climate change experiments need to take these different aspects of realistic stressor exposure into account, in order to produce useful and informative results. To that end, the fourth chapter of this dissertation describes a low-cost, versatile experimental control system that other researchers and students can use to implement realistic, temporally variable experimental exposures to multiple stressors. Therefore, this dissertation contributes to both the conceptual and technical advancement of experimental climate change research in marine systems.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Low, Hui Ning Natalie | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Micheli, Fiorenza | |
| Thesis advisor | Micheli, Fiorenza | |
| Thesis advisor | De Leo, Giulio A | |
| Thesis advisor | Palumbi, Stephen R | |
| Thesis advisor | Somero, George | |
| Degree committee member | De Leo, Giulio A | |
| Degree committee member | Palumbi, Stephen R | |
| Degree committee member | Somero, George | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Biology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Hui Ning Natalie Low. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Biology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Hui Ning Natalie Low
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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