Project: Collaborative Research: A metabolic index to predict the consequences of climate change for midwater ecosystems

Description from NSF award abstract:
With climate change, ocean temperatures are expected to increase which in turn will reduce oxygen availability and increase metabolic oxygen demand in marine organisms. The investigators will conduct shipboard physiological experiments for various marine organisms and determine their distributions in relation to environmental conditions within an oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The goal will be to model and map a Metabolic Index (MI) to predict how vertical and horizontal distributions for these species might change throughout the world's oceans in the future. The MI is defined as the ratio between environmental oxygen supply and temperature-dependent oxygen demand. Oxygen supply includes both the environmental oxygen concentration across a habitat range and the physiological features of organisms that facilitate oxygen uptake, such as gills and circulatory systems. Thus, the MI will integrate measured tolerance and environmental exposure to low oxygen with environmental data. The investigators will measure tolerance to low oxygen, focusing on under-studied organisms, including the effect of temperature and organism size. They will sample along a natural gradient in oxygen content south of the California Current in the Eastern Pacific. The science team and a videographer will develop a blog about deep-sea biology and climate change using web-based and video technologies. Four graduate students will be funded on this project, and in conjunction with a recently developed course in pelagic ecology, several undergraduates will have the opportunity to participate in seagoing research.

This research fills a critical need for a physiology-based metric that can be used to predict changing marine communities as the oceans warm and hypoxic zones expand. Modern OMZs are extensive and characterized by deep-water (300-800 m) oxygen partial pressures lethal to most marine organisms, yet thriving communities exist there. Climate change is predicted to further deplete oxygen. The investigators will model and map a Metabolic Index (MI) for diverse marine species to help predict how in vertical and horizontal distributions of species may change throughout the world's oceans in the future. The MI will derive oxygen supply and demand data from published and planned measurements of the minimum environmental partial pressure of oxygen to which individual species are exposed (based on their distributions in the water column) and the minimum requirements to support routine aerobic metabolic demand (from shipboard respiration measurements of individuals). During research cruises in the Eastern Pacific along a gradient of OMZ intensity, the investigators will conduct shipboard physiological measurements to determine metabolic demand for understudied mesozooplankton and gelatinous taxa and determine the size- and temperature dependence for diverse species for incorporation into the MI. Vertically-stratified net sampling and in situ photography will identify and characterize unique OMZ community features, such as the lower oxycline biomass peak present in some OMZs and the oxygen-dependence of day and night habitat depths for vertically-migrating species. The MI will be mapped using climatological data to both test and generate hypotheses about the response of oceanic communities to climate change. In preliminary analysis, the MI suggests a metabolic constraint at a MI of ~2 that may act to limit vertical and horizontal habitat ranges.