Collaborative Research: Turbulence-spurred settlement: Deciphering a newly recognized class of larval response

概述：有了这个奖项，研究人员将探索栖息地范围的海洋过程，该过程有可能将对幼虫传递的研究与对幼虫如何对与底物相关的线索做出反应的了解结合起来。这项工作将以已公布的初步数据为基础，表明高能近岸环境的湍流切变特性启动了幼虫的定居并转变为幼体阶段。这些先前的研究结果表明：1)由于湍流强度作为破浪强度和其他因素的函数可预测地变化，湍流可以作为幼虫接近合适栖息地的指示器，在更大范围的扩散现象和近底搜索和选择行为之间提供联系；以及2)幼虫对湍流的反应是前所未有的。与典型的线索不同，湍流不会直接导致沉着，而是刺激对化学线索不敏感的“预能”幼虫变得“有能力”，从而使它们获得对这些线索的反应并经历沉着。跨学科团队结合了幼虫生物学、感觉生态学和生物流相互作用方面的专业知识，这是解决这一主题所必需的。他们将采用系统发育学稳健的方法来探索一类广泛的、具有生态重要性的生物(海胆及其近亲)的湍流反应的范围和适应意义，并将确定这种反应是否与这些生物成年栖息地特有的环境条件相一致。他们还将测试早熟、湍流引起的沉降在生态上的重要功能后果。这项工作将对一类全新的定居诱导剂进行详细的研究，这种诱导剂具有很强的潜力来改变当前对幼虫分散阶段的概念化，它们在多个尺度上检测栖息地的特征的能力，以及生物体水平的特征可能影响种群连通性的方式。智力价值：具有分散生活期的生物如何找到回到成体栖息地的途径是海洋生态学中的一个基本问题。大量研究探索了运输、交付、定居和招聘之间的联系，并在知识方面取得了重大进展。然而，对幼虫招募过程的完全了解仍然难以捉摸。估计扩散的标准工具(例如，数值环流模型)的空间分辨率有限，这使得它们无法在几百米以下的尺度上预测幼虫如何与海岸相互作用。对幼虫附着的研究主要集中在化学、触觉或接近底部的流体动力学线索上，这些线索从微米到厘米都很活跃。本项目的新奇之处在于，它将侧重于生境规模的过程--运输和定居之间--对这些过程的理解存在差距。更广泛的影响：该项目将为整合传播扩散和定居的关键概念提供一个框架，这是海洋科学中两个基本但在很大程度上相互脱节的主题。这项研究将产生的理解将为沿海海洋资源的基于生态系统的管理提供关键信息。这项研究的结果将通过出版物和会议报告进行传播。此外，还将开展强有力的教育和公众宣传工作。调查人员将根据他们的研究开发一个“从冲浪到结算”的虚拟实验室活动，该活动将被纳入VirtualUrchin网络平台，这是斯坦福大学一个被广泛利用的教育资源，每月有数千名独立用户。通过与旧金山湾国家河口研究保护区的联系，他们将把“从冲浪到定居”活动整合到为加州中部教育工作者举办的NERS专业发展研讨会之一，从而将这一资源传播给数十名教师和数千名学生，并从他们那里获得宝贵的反馈。该项目还将继续与当地一所社区学院(圣罗莎社区学院)建立现有的伙伴关系，为那些本来很少接触研究企业的本科生提供一种手段，通过延长实习时间接受科学过程方面的培训和指导。此外，研究人员将扩大开发一个高质量的视频/照片资源，记录一系列广泛的动物门的早期发育、幼虫形态和行为，并将通过与国际知名的蒙特利湾水族馆的现有合作向公众传播这一资源。

Overview: With this award the investigators will explore a habitat-scale oceanographic process that has the potential to integrate studies of larval delivery with an understanding of how larvae respond to substrate-associated cues. This work will build on published and preliminary data indicating that turbulent shear characteristic of high-energy near shore environments primes larvae to initiate settlement and to transform into the juvenile stage. These prior findings suggest that: 1) Because turbulence intensity varies predictably as a function of the strength of wave breaking and other factors, turbulence could operate as an indicator for larvae of their approach to suitable habitat, providing a link between larger-scale dispersal phenomena, and near-bottom search and selection behaviors; and. 2) The larval response to turbulence acts in an unprecedented fashion. In contrast to typical cues, turbulence does not induce settlement directly, but rather spurs otherwise "pre-competent" larvae that are refractory to chemical cues to become "competent", thereby causing them to acquire responsiveness to such cues and undergo settlement. The interdisciplinary team has combined expertise in larval biology, sensory ecology, and organism-flow interactions necessary to address this topic. They will employ a phylogenetically robust approach to explore the scope and adaptive significance of the turbulence response in a widespread and ecologically important class of organisms (echinoids; sea urchins and their relatives), and will determine whether the response is aligned with environmental conditions characteristic of these organisms' adult habitat. They will also test for ecologically important functional consequences of precocious, turbulence-induced settlement. This work will provide a detailed look at an entirely new class of settlement inducer, one with strong potential for changing current conceptualizations of dispersing larval stages, their ability to detect signatures of habitat across multiple scales, and the ways in which organism-level traits might influence population connectivity.Intellectual Merit : How organisms with dispersing life stages find their way back to adult habitat is a fundamental question in marine ecology. Considerable research has explored links between transport, delivery, settlement, and recruitment, with important advances in knowledge. However, a complete understanding of the larval recruitment process remains elusive. Standard tools for estimating dispersal (e.g., numerical circulation models) have limited spatial resolution, which prevents them from predicting at scales below a few hundred meters how larvae will interact with the shore. Studies investigating larval attachment have focused on chemical, tactile, or near-bottom hydrodynamic cues active across microns to centimeters. The novelty of the present project is that it will focus on processes at habitat scales -- between transport and settlement -- where there is a gap in the understanding of processes. Broader Impacts: This project will provide a framework for integrating key concepts of propagule dispersal and settlement, two fundamental but largely disjunct themes in marine science. The understanding that will come from this study will provide key information for ecosystem based management of coastal marine resources. The findings of the study will be communicated via publications and conference presentations. There will also be a robust education and public outreach effort. The investigators will develop a "Surfing to Settlement" virtual lab activity based on their research that will be incorporated into the VirtualUrchin web platform, a widely exploited educational resource at Stanford that gets thousands of unique users per month. Through connections to the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, they will integrate the "Surfing to Settlement" activity into one of NERRs professional development workshops for central California educators, thus disseminating this resource to and gaining valuable feedback from dozens of teachers and thousands of students. The project will also continue an existing partnership with a local community college (Santa Rosa Community College) that provides a means for undergraduates who would otherwise get little exposure to the research enterprise to receive training and mentorship in the scientific process via extended internships. In addition, the investigators will expand development of a high-quality video/photo resource that documents early development, larval morphology and behavior in a phylogenetically broad array of animal phyla, and will disseminate this resource to the public via an existing collaboration with the internationally known Monterey Bay Aquarium.