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Oceanic Organisms May Be Able To Adapt To Climate Change, New Study

A team of scientists from the US and Germany found an ingenious way to study the impact of climate change on multiple generations of oceanic organisms. The team of six scientists were led by biologist Melissa Pespeni from University of Vermont, and post-doctoral scientist Reid Brennan, from GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Germany. The study revealed that ocean life may be able to adapt well to climate change. However, it does come with a huge caveat attached to it.

The scientists identified a tiny sea creature, close to the bottom of the food chain, that can reproduce and create a new generation in approximately twenty days. The sea creature is copepod, which is a crustacean consumed by other sea creatures, and can pass about twenty generations in approximately one year. The scientists artificially exposed the multiple generations of copepod to the elements of climate change, such as increasing sea temperatures and carbon levels, and found that the creatures were able to adapt well to the impacts of climate change. However, when the scientist re-exposed the creatures to current levels of climate conditions, the adapted and evolved creatures did not fair well. This indicates that evolution of the sea creature may be linear and may have a difficult time adapting back to current conditions if human beings can bring down global temperatures and carbon levels.

The team comprised of scientists from University of Vermont, University of Connecticut, GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research and University of Colorado, Boulder. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and was published in the journal Nature Communications. The scientists observed a plethora of changes on how the copepods evolved and adapted to the impacts of climate change, including how they adapted to increasing temperatures, grow their skeletons in increasing acidic waters, produce energy and other cellular processes. The team noted that copepods may be resilient to climate change by evolving and adapting accordingly to the conditions brought on by climate change. This can provide some idea how other sea creatures may adapt to the impacts of climate change as it would be almost impossible to study other creatures that can take hundreds of years to pass multiple generations.

The scientists termed the ability to adapt well to the impacts of climate change as “Phenotypic plasticity”. This ability degraded when the creatures were re-exposed to the original climate conditions. The creatures were able to return to their former make within three generations but were less healthy, produced lesser offspring and responded poorly to external stress and lower supply of food.

Pespeni contemplates "If copepods or other creatures have to go down this adaptive path and spend some of their genetic variation to deal with climate change will they be able to tolerate some new environmental stressor, some other change in the environment?” Brennan expressed that we need to be cautious using a simplified model to study how these creatures evolve over multiple generations.

Overall, the study provides us valuable information on how sea creatures may adapt to climate change. At the same time, this is an artificial evolution and other creatures may not respond similarly over the hundreds of years like the copepods.