Volume 15, Number 28: 11 July 2012
In an important paper published in the May 2012 issue of Nature Geoscience, Lohbeck et al. write that "our present understanding of the sensitivity of marine life to ocean acidification is based primarily on short-term experiments," which often depict negative effects. However, they go on to say that phytoplanktonic species with short generation times "may be able to respond to environmental alterations through adaptive evolution." And with this tantalizing possibility in mind, they studied, as they describe it, "the ability of the world's single most important calcifying organism, the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi, to evolve in response to ocean acidification in two 500-generation selection experiments."
Working with freshly isolated genotypes from Bergen, Norway, the three German researchers grew them in batch cultures over some 500 asexual generations at three different atmospheric CO2 concentrations - ambient (400 ppm), medium (1100 ppm) and high (2200 ppm) - where the medium CO2 treatment was chosen to represent the atmospheric CO2 level projected for the beginning of the next century. This they did in a multi-clone experiment designed to provide existing genetic variation that they said "would be readily available to genotypic selection," as well as in a single-clone experiment that was initiated with one "haphazardly chosen genotype," where evolutionary adaptation would obviously require new mutations. So what did they learn?
Compared with populations kept at ambient CO2 partial pressure, Lohbeck et al. found that those selected at increased CO2 levels "exhibited higher growth rates, in both the single- and multi-clone experiment, when tested under ocean acidification conditions." Calcification rates, on the other hand, were somewhat lower under CO2-enriched conditions in all cultures; but the research team reports that they were "up to 50% higher in adapted [medium and high CO2] compared with non-adapted cultures." And when all was said and done, they concluded that "contemporary evolution could help to maintain the functionality of microbial processes at the base of marine food webs in the face of global change [our italics]."
In other ruminations on their findings, the marine biologists indicate that what they call the swift adaptation processes they observed may "have the potential to affect food-web dynamics and biogeochemical cycles on timescales of a few years, thus surpassing predicted rates of ongoing global change including ocean acidification." And they also note, in this regard, that "a recent study reports surprisingly high coccolith mass in an E. huxleyi population off Chile in high-CO2 waters (Beaufort et al., 2011)," which observation is said by them to be indicative of "across-population variation in calcification, in line with findings of rapid microevolution identified here."
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Beaufort, L., Probert, I., de Garidel-Thoron, T., Bendif, E.M., Ruiz-Pino, D., Metzl, N., Goyet, C., Buchet, N., Coupel, P., Grelaud, M., Rost, B., Rickaby, R.E.M. and de Vargas, C. 2011. Sensitivity of coccolithophores to carbonate chemistry and ocean acidification. Nature 476: 80-83.
Lohbeck, K.T., Riebesell, U. and Reusch, T.B.H. 2012. Adaptive evolution of a key phytoplankton species to ocean acidification. Nature Geoscience 5: 346-351.