Marine biologist and physiologist Martin Tresguerres, who has spent his career studying how marine animals function, is particularly interested in “how climate change might impact those functions, and if there is a scope for certain species to do better than others,” he said.

The grant is “unusual,” Tresguerres said, in that it establishes a collaboration of 13 scientists from several distinct disciplines, instead of funding one lab.

The center unites researchers from Scripps Oceanography and across the UCSD campus, the University of Southern California, Carnegie Science, the University of Virginia and MacEwan University in a diverse team of experts in marine biology, neurobiology and genomics.

“Having this center will allow us to look at this problem … from biological complexity, from genes to cells to organisms, and also to look at the relevance for the natural environment,” Tresguerres said.

What is “the problem?” 

The problem is climate change: “We’re going to focus on the effects of warming, elevated temperatures, hypoxia (lower oxygen levels in the water) and acidification, which is caused by increased carbon dioxide,” he said.

Many of the essential functions carried out by marine animals, from selecting a place to settle and sourcing food to finding a mate and reproducing, are coordinated by the organism’s nervous system, Tresguerres explained. 

All of these functions “work optimally or better under certain conditions,” he said. If water temperature or other conditions are modified, some functions may still happen but worsen while others cease to happen.

But some animals “might have the ability to switch, or modify, their system to … work better at the new temperature, or they can work better with lower oxygen levels,” Tresguerres said.

What researchers at the new center will ask, he said, is “whether this ability that animals have to adapt to naturally changing environments will still be good enough to deal with changes due to human-induced climate change, which could be a lot more rapid and more pronounced.”

The team will work to identify the mechanisms that make animals capable of adapting to climate change, including any genetic and cellular mechanisms.

This identification might allow scientists to “predict which species are more vulnerable, which ones are more resilient,” Tresguerres said. “That can help efforts for conservation.”

“Let’s say you want to introduce a certain population of fish to try to counteract the effects of climate change,” he said. “Our research hopefully will help identify the strains or species that are more persistent.”

Tresguerres relates that hypothetical optimism to modalities of human health, in which some humans are more resistant to certain viruses, a feature used to help design vaccines and treatments.

Knowing why some marine animals are more affected by climate change than others, he said, “can lead to science-based solutions.”

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