Bioenergetic Approaches to Define Resilience Potential to Compounding Environmental Stressors

Predicting how marine organisms may respond to rapid anthropogenic change is a major challenge in environmental sciences. It is difficult, however, to design biological experiments to test for the near-infinite combinatorial possibilities and potential interactions of biotic and abiotic processes in a changing ocean. Bioenergetic modeling of homeostatic stability provides a powerful framework for assessing the capacity of organisms to respond to compounding stressors. Since biological variance in response to ocean change is clearly evident, predictive analysis will require a merging of information on environmental, genetic, and physiological processes. Our approach is based on defining (1) metabolic limits of organismal resilience, (2) capacity for trade-offs in allocation of cellular ATP to specific response strategies, (3) biochemical markers of ‘tipping points’ beyond which a range of stressors become lethal, and (4) genomic bases of physiological resilience by gene mapping. Such analyses offer new approaches to assess the levels of different stressors that an organism may be able to cope with under defined (laboratory) and unknown (field) conditions and to improve predictions of adaptive responses and resiliency limits to ocean change.