2025/06/16 by Fanny Vermandele, Ellia Roy, Matthew Sasaki +4 · 1 voice
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Ocean Acidification Effects and Responses #Marine and fisheries research #Marine and coastal plant biology
paper · doi:10.1016/j.marenvres.2025.107286
openalex publication_date 2025/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Parental environments can positively or negatively influence offspring phenotypes through non-genetic inheritance known as parental effects. Our understanding of these mechanisms across generations during simultaneous extreme events, such as marine heatwaves (MHW) and hypoxia, is however very limited. This is particularly true when parents and offspring experience highly contrasting environments. Additionally, the potential for females and males to show contrasting responses to these parental effects is largely overlooked. Our study tested the recovery potential of the cosmopolitan and highly abundant copepod Acartia tonsa, following parental exposure to hypoxia and MHW. Parents (F1) were exposed for five days to the isolated or combined effects of hypoxia and MHW. Following hatching, their offspring (F2) were returned to control conditions for the rest of their life cycle. Copepods' survival, prosome length, metabolic rate and heat tolerance were measured in adult males and females (F1-F2) to assess the effect of parental exposure on offspring's sex-specific life-history and physiological performances when adult. Reaction norms between the two generations reveal that the direction of changes in the F2 phenotypes was treatment-dependent and sex-specific. Strong negative parental effects were also observed for all traits, with the exception of metabolic rates, following parental exposure to the MHW condition in isolation. Our results highlight the need to investigate in depth the long-lasting effects of extreme events, as the legacy of stress we report here could limit species' ability to recover from successive MHW events and impact species persistence in a changing ocean.