Collaborative Research: Using an Energetics Framework to Forecast the Interactive Effects of Abiotic and Biotic Stressors on Intertidal Mussels

环境变化对动植物的影响是众所周知的，许多研究表明，环境变化不仅会改变物种的生理健康，还会改变物种之间相互作用的方式。它还表明，环境变化的一些最早可检测到的影响可能在于生物体生长和繁殖能力的改变，而不仅仅是致死率。该项目将开发一个框架，用于研究极端环境变化对缅因州湾贻贝（Mytilus edulis）的影响，这是一种生态和经济上都很重要的双壳类物种，该物种正以异常快的速度变暖。重要的是，我们的建模框架第一次能够解释温度变化与捕食者存在时发生的额外压力之间的相互作用。因此，这些模型不仅将促进我们对自然界中多种应激源如何影响动物的基本理解，而且还将提供一种机制，用于预测现实野外条件下环境变化的影响，而这些影响往往被实验室实验所忽视。该项目还将利用尖端的虚拟现实技术，结合实地实践学习，创造新的方法，让高中生了解极端变化对当地环境的影响。本项目旨在开发一种预测能量学（动态能量预算）方法，定量探索非生物（温度）和生物（捕食风险）压力源对潮间带贻贝的潜在相互作用。这个项目解决的核心问题是，如果只关注孤立的而不是非生物或生物压力源的综合影响，那么对环境变化影响的预测会有多不可靠？迫切需要一个考虑环境变化对多种相互作用的物种的影响的框架。建立在一个能量学模型的基础上，这个模型已经被参数化，用来量化温度和食物对贻贝的影响，这个项目扩展了研究被捕食风险的方法——“害怕被吃掉”——在有捕食者存在的更现实的野外条件下如何改变热敏性。该团队之前的工作表明，捕食风险的影响与预测的气候情景所造成的影响相当，甚至超过了这些风险，但很少有人尝试将这些风险影响置于生物能量学框架内，特别是在海洋系统中。本提案利用两个研究小组的高度互补的方法来开发一个预测框架，研究在现实的野外和营养相互作用条件下，非生物和生物压力源对重要生态系统工程师的生长、最大尺寸和繁殖的累积影响。

The impacts of environmental change on animals and plants is well established, and numerous studies have shown that not only does environmental change alter the physiological health of species, it also can alter the ways in which species interact with one another. It also suggests that some of the first detectable impacts of environmental change may lie in alterations in the ability of organisms to grow and reproduce, rather than just lethality. This project will develop a framework for looking at the impacts of extreme environmental change on an ecologically and economically important bivalve species, the mussel Mytilus edulis, in the Gulf of Maine, which is warming at an unusually fast rate. Importantly, our modeling framework is, for the first time, able to account for the interactions of temperature change with the additional stresses that occur in the presence of predators. These models will therefore not only advance our basic understanding of how multiple stressors affect animals in nature, but also will provide a mechanism for predicting the impacts of environmental change under realistic field conditions that are often ignored by laboratory-only based experiments. The project also will create novel methods for teaching high school students about the impacts of extreme change on their local environments using cutting-edge virtual-reality technology coupled with hands-on experiential learning in the field.This project seeks to develop a predictive energetics (Dynamic Energy Budget) approach to quantitatively explore the potentially interactive effects of abiotic (temperature) and biotic (risk of predation) stressors on intertidal mussels. The central question that addressed by this project is, how unreliable may predictions of the impacts of environmental change be if a focus is placed only on the isolated rather than combined influence of abiotic or biotic stressors? A framework that considers the effects of environmental change on multiple, interacting species is sorely needed. Building upon an energetics model already parameterized to quantify the effects of temperature and food availability on the mussel Mytilus edulis, this project expands the approach to examine how predation risk - the "fear of being eaten" - may alter thermal sensitivity under more realistic field conditions where predators are present. Previous work by this team has shown that the effects of predation risk are comparable to, or exceed those, caused by predicted climate scenarios, but very few attempts have been made to place these risk effects within a bioenergetics framework, especially in marine systems. This proposal capitalizes on the highly complementary approaches of two research groups to develop a predictive framework examining the cumulative effects of abiotic and biotic stressors on growth, maximum size and reproduction of an important ecosystem engineer under realistic field and trophic interaction conditions.