To brood or not to brood: Are marine invertebrates that protect their offspring more resilient to ocean acidification?

ABSTRACT: Anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is being absorbed by seawater resulting in increasingly acidic oceans, a process known as ocean acidification (OA). OA is thought to have largely deleterious effects on marine invertebrates, primarily impacting early life stages and consequently, their recruitment and species' survival. Most research in this field has been limited to short-term, single-species and single-life stage studies, making it difficult to determine which taxa will be evolutionarily successful under OA conditions. We circumvent these limitations by relating the dominance and distribution of the known polychaete worm species living in a naturally acidic seawater vent system to their life history strategies. These data are coupled with breeding experiments, showing all do

SUBMITTER: Lucey NM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4648422 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature