Suspension feeding bivalves play a critical role in many coastal ecosystems. In intertidal habitats, major environmental factors such as T, DO, pH, salinity, or food availability can vary rapidly on time scales of minutes to hours over the slightly shifting day-night and tidal cycles, creating a wide range of possible multi-stressor scenarios and sequences. For example, in estuaries around Long Island, NY, the ribbed mussel (Geukensia demissa), a keystone species in saltmarsh ecosystems along the east coast of the US, can be exposed to pronounced hypercapnic hypoxia during summer nighttime high tides in parallel with daily temperature ranges of 20 °C. Many traditional measures of shellfish performance only provide snapshots of shellfish condition and do not capture behavioral or physiological responses with temporal resolutions that match the dynamism of the environment. This presentation will highlight the potential of high-frequency, non-invasive sensors to record heartbeat rates and valve gaping behavior in-situ and during laboratory stress tests to fill this knowledge gap. While ribbed mussels seem well-adapted to cope with a large degree of environmental variability, identifying environmental thresholds that relate to non-lethal stress and the ability to recover from sequential or re-occurring multi-stressor events is critically needed to predict tipping points in changing coastal oceans that can lead to shellfish population collapse, resulting in altered ecosystem function and loss of ecosystem services provided by these keystone species.      

Primary Presenter: Nils Volkenborn, Stony Brook University (nils.volkenborn@stonybrook.edu)

Authors:

Nathaniel Chester, Stony Brook University  (nathanieltchester@gmail.com)

Ian Dwyer, Stony Brook University  (ian.dwyer@stonybrook.edu)