Project: Micronekton of the Cariaco Basin: Adaptation to a severe oxygen minimum

The major goals of this project were changed somewhat when collecting data in the Cariaco region of the Caribbean was not possible due to "severe problems with infrastructure at the proposed study site" (from Final Report).

The first goal was expanded to include the study of species of coral from the Antarctic, the Gulf of Mexico and the coastal waters of Puerto Rico to shed light on metabolic adaptation to depth, darkness, and temperature. 

Coral habitats span the range from tropical to polar, extremely shallow to thousands of
feet deep. The differences in light, temperature, and depth experienced in these varied
habitats likely affect the metabolic rates of the corals residing there. The metabolism of
three coral species from different habitats were examined to elucidate the effects
of these environmental parameters on an under-studied aspect of coral biology.

The second goal was to determine the adaptation to temperature of tropical and subtropical teleosts at the mitochondrial level.

The maintenance of a functional energy balance in ectothermic fauna can be
challenging in a thermally disparate environment. The present work describes how the
energetic machinery in the cell, particularly the mitochondrion, is affected by
temperature changes. More specifically, this work determined how environmental
temperature affects the mitochondrial energetic performance of fishes from disparate
thermal regimes.

(excerpted from the Final Report for Award 0727883.