| Website | https://www.matthew-sasaki.com |
Matt Sasaki
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Evolutionary ecologist & biological oceanographer // NSF OCE postdoc at University of Vermont // Invert enthusiast // He | Him // š³ļøāš
Starvation eventually did reduce thermal limits, making copepods more susceptible to heat stress. But one of the cool things about this study is that we were able to determine when those effects kick in! By measuring thermal limits every day, we show that copepods have a two day buffer period before food limitation reduces thermal limits
New preprint! Got to work with a stellar REU student last year on project measuring how #starvation affects #copepod #temperature tolerance.
Zack LabeUh, how large is this sea ice anomaly going to get? š„“
More visualizations at https://zacklabe.com/antarctic-sea-ice-extentconcentration/. More background on this ongoing extreme event at https://wired.com/story/antarctic-sea-ice-is-at-record-lows-is-it-an-alarming-shift/ and https://abc.net.au/news/2023-05-31/antarctic-sea-ice-hits-another-record-low/102391534.
Elizabeth MillerNew preprint: Where does southern CA become northern CA? I used historical biogeography approaches to answer this question: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.10.540198v1
This project shows clearly that rapid changes in TPCs (or the lack thereof) affect the relative vulnerability of species to heatwaves, and is important for predicting community-level effects of these events.
Why one species has variable TPCs and the other does not is a question I hope someone follows up on, but as a side note, some of our other work shows that within tonsa the seasonally variable TPCs result at least in part from rapid genetic changes!
For hudsonica (static TPC species), vulnerability to heatwaves changes seasonally as environmental temperatures approach (and eventually exceed!) the thermal optimum. For tonsa (variable TPC), thermal optima stayed well above water temperatures at all times, keeping vulnerability low throughout the year.
To hit the highlights, we showed that there's strong seasonal variation in the TPCs of one common species of coastal copepod (Acartia tonsa) but not its congener (A. hudsonica).
Excited to finally get this #preprint out! This one digs into #copepod thermal performance curves, how much they vary across seasons, and how this might affect vulnerability of #plankton to #climatechange and #heatwaves (spoiler - it totally does).