Multi-site salt marsh restoration can recover key natural functions despite long-term structural deviations and site-level differences.

Restoration studies often focus on short-term structural recovery, while achieving consistent, long-term functional outcomes across diverse sites remains a challenge, limiting scalability. We evaluated the long-term structural and functional effectiveness (average match to reference natural sites) and outcome consistency (dispersion around the average) of two salt marsh restoration methods in the Venice Lagoon: RC which favours tidal creek formation at the low shore, and RB, which does not. Sampling was conducted at mid and low shore levels in restored marshes over 10 years old.

Microclimate drives intraspecific thermal specialization: conservation perspectives in freshwater habitats.

Endemic and relict species are often confined to ecological refugia or over fragmented distributions, representing priority conservation subjects. Within these sites, the individual population may realize distinct niches to a varying degree of specialization. An emblematic example is provided by freshwater species segregated in thermal-mineral springs, where individuals may face highly diverse microclimates in limited geographic areas.

Sea urchin chronicles. The effect of oxygen super-saturation and marine polluted sediments from Bagnoli-Coroglio Bay on different life stages of the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus.

In marinas and harbours, the accumulation of pollutants in sediments, combined with poor exchange of water with the open sea, poses a major environmental threat. The presence of photosynthetic organisms and the related oxygen production, however, may alleviate the negative effects of environmental contamination on heterotrophic organisms, enhancing their physiological defences. Furthermore, possible transgenerational buffer effects may increase the ability of natural populations to face environmental stress.

Texture features explain the susceptibility of grapevine cultivars to Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae) infestation in ripening and drying grapes.

Grapevine is a well-known host plant of the invasive pest Drosophila suzukii, but its susceptibility to pest oviposition and development greatly depends on the cultivar. To address environmental sustainability during viticultural zoning planning, new vineyard plantation and Integrated Pest Management programmes, it is essential to take pest pressure and cultivar susceptibility into account. To determine the different grapevine cultivars susceptibility to D.

Oxygen supersaturation protects coastal marine fauna from ocean warming.

Ocean warming affects the life history and fitness of marine organisms by, among others, increasing animal metabolism and reducing oxygen availability. In coastal habitats, animals live in close association with photosynthetic organisms whose oxygen supply supports metabolic demands and may compensate for acute warming. Using a unique high-frequency monitoring dataset, we show that oxygen supersaturation resulting from photosynthesis closely parallels sea temperature rise during diel cycles in Red Sea coastal habitats.

Ocean acidification and elevated temperature negatively affect recruitment, oxygen consumption and calcification of the reef-building Dendropoma cristatum early life stages: Evidence from a manipulative field study.

Expected temperature rise and seawater pH decrease may affect marine organism fitness. By a transplant experiment involving air-temperature manipulation along a natural CO gradient, we investigated the effects of high pCO (~1100 μatm) and elevated temperature (up to +2 °C than ambient conditions) on the reproductive success, recruitment, growth, shell chemical composition and oxygen consumption of the early life stages of the intertidal reef-building vermetid Dendropoma cristatum. Reproductive success was predominantly affected by temperature increase, with encapsulated embryos exhibiting higher survival in control than elevated temperature conditions, which were in turn unaffected by altered seawater pH levels.

Winter temperature predicts prolonged diapause in pine processionary moth species across their geographic range.

Prolonged diapause occurs in a number of insects and is interpreted as a way to evade adverse conditions. The winter pine processionary moths ( and ) are important pests of pines and cedars in the Mediterranean region. They are typically univoltine, with larvae feeding across the winter, pupating in spring in the soil and emerging as adults in summer.

Temperature-induced phenotypic plasticity in the ovipositor of the invasive species Drosophila suzukii.

Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura, 1931) is a highly successful invasive dipteran which represents a serious threat for global fruit industry. Among other adaptive traits, D. suzukii owes its success to the derived morphological features of its ovipositor, which allows the insect to exploit the exclusive ecological niche of fresh fruit, thus avoiding competition with other closely related species.

Concurrent environmental stressors and jellyfish stings impair caged European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) physiological performances.

The increasing frequency of jellyfish outbreaks in coastal areas has led to multiple ecological and socio-economic issues, including mass mortalities of farmed fish. We investigated the sensitivity of the European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax), a widely cultured fish in the Mediterranean Sea, to the combined stressors of temperature, hypoxia and stings from the jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca, through measurement of oxygen consumption rates (MO2), critical oxygen levels (PO2crit), and histological analysis of tissue damage. Higher levels of MO2, PO2crit and gill damage in treated fish demonstrated that the synergy of environmental and biotic stressors dramatically impair farmed fish metabolic performances and increase their health vulnerability.

Effects of ocean acidification on embryonic respiration and development of a temperate wrasse living along a natural CO2 gradient.

Volcanic CO2 seeps provide opportunities to investigate the effects of ocean acidification on organisms in the wild. To understand the influence of increasing CO2 concentrations on the metabolic rate (oxygen consumption) and the development of ocellated wrasse early life stages, we ran two field experiments, collecting embryos from nesting sites with different partial pressures of CO2 [pCO2; ambient (∼400 µatm) and high (800-1000 µatm)] and reciprocally transplanting embryos from ambient- to high-CO2 sites for 30 h. Ocellated wrasse offspring brooded in different CO2 conditions had similar responses, but after transplanting portions of nests to the high-CO2 site, embryos from parents that spawned in ambient conditions had higher metabolic rates.

The trade-off between heat tolerance and metabolic cost drives the bimodal life strategy at the air-water interface.

The principle of oxygen and capacity limitation of thermal tolerance in ectotherms suggests that the long-term upper limits of an organism's thermal niche are equivalent to the upper limits of the organism's functional capacity for oxygen provision to tissues. Air-breathing ectotherms show wider thermal tolerances, since they can take advantage of the higher availability of oxygen in air than in water. Bimodal species move from aquatic to aerial media and switch between habitats in response to environmental variations such as cyclical or anomalous temperature fluctuations.

The importance of thermal history: costs and benefits of heat exposure in a tropical, rocky shore oyster.

Although thermal performance is widely recognised to be pivotal in determining species' distributions, assessment of this performance is often based on laboratory-acclimated individuals, neglecting their proximate thermal history. The thermal history of a species sums the evolutionary history and, importantly, the thermal events recently experienced by individuals, including short-term acclimation to environmental variations. Thermal history is perhaps of greatest importance for species inhabiting thermally challenging environments and therefore assumed to be living close to their thermal limits, such as in the tropics.

Can respiratory physiology predict thermal niches?

Predicting species responses to global warming is the holy grail of climate change science. As temperature directly affects physiological rates, it is clear that a mechanistic understanding of species vulnerability should be grounded in organismal physiology. Here, we review what respiratory physiology can offer the field of thermal ecology, showcasing different perspectives on how respiratory physiology can help explain thermal niches.

Improved heat tolerance in air drives the recurrent evolution of air-breathing.

The transition to air-breathing by formerly aquatic species has occurred repeatedly and independently in fish, crabs and other animal phyla, but the proximate drivers of this key innovation remain a long-standing puzzle in evolutionary biology. Most studies attribute the onset of air-breathing to the repeated occurrence of aquatic hypoxia; however, this hypothesis leaves the current geographical distribution of the 300 genera of air-breathing crabs unexplained. Here, we show that their occurrence is mainly related to high environmental temperatures in the tropics.

A role for haemolymph oxygen capacity in heat tolerance of eurythermal crabs.

Heat tolerance in aquatic ectotherms is constrained by a mismatch, occurring at high temperatures, between oxygen delivery and demand which compromises the maintenance of aerobic scope. The present study analyses how the wide thermal tolerance range of an eurythermal model species, the green crab Carcinus maenas is supported and limited by its ability to sustain efficient oxygen transport to tissues. Similar to other eurytherms, C.

Climate change reduces offspring fitness in littoral spawners: a study integrating organismic response and long-term time-series.

Integrating long-term ecological observations with experimental findings on species response and tolerance to environmental stress supports an understanding of climate effects on population dynamics. Here, we combine the two approaches, laboratory experiments and analysis of multi-decadal time-series, to understand the consequences of climate anomalies and ongoing change for the population dynamics of a eurythermal littoral species, Carcinus aestuarii. For the generation of cause and effect hypotheses we investigated the thermal response of crab embryos at four developmental stages.

Coping with cyclic oxygen availability: evolutionary aspects.

Both the gradual rise in atmospheric oxygen over the Proterozoic Eon as well as episodic fluctuations in oxygen over several million-year time spans during the Phanerozoic Era, have arguably exerted strong selective forces on cellular and organismic respiratory specialization and evolution. The rise in atmospheric oxygen, some 2 billion years after the origin of life, dramatically altered cell biology and set the stage for the appearance of multicelluar life forms in the Vendian (Ediacaran) Period of the Neoproterozoic Era. Over much of the Paleozoic, the level of oxygen in the atmosphere was near the present atmospheric level (21%).

Quaternary structure and functional properties of Penaeus monodon hemocyanin.

The hemocyanin of the tiger shrimp, Penaeus monodon, was investigated with respect to stability and oxygen binding. While hexamers occur as a major component, dodecamers and traces of higher aggregates are also found. Both the hexamers and dodecamers were found to be extremely stable against dissociation at high pH, independently of the presence of calcium ions, in contrast to the known crustacean hemocyanins.