Offspring coping abilities from stressed parents exposed to global warming in aquaculture and fisheries systems

ended

Climate change is affecting the ecosystem’s resilience, biodiversity, productivity, and health. One major societal issue is to secure food destined for human consumption. Fish are the primary resource for essential fatty acids and proteins for billions of people and they contribute significantly to species diversity and functioning of marine, estuarine, and freshwater ecosystems. Yet, we are still limited in our ability to accurately predict how climate-change stressors will affect fish populations. To date, we are crucially lacking studies evaluating the impacts of climate change linking subfields of fish ecology such as genetics, behaviour, physiology, community dynamics or spatial ecology. Other essential aspects of climate-change impacts, such as cross-generational effects and sex-specific responses of parents that could adaptively prepare the offspring, are also often ignored. The proposed project has three main objectives: (1) investigate the effects of parental thermal stress on offspring’s coping abilities to face multiple climate stressors, (2) evaluate the impact of thermal stress on sex-specific response and decipher the sex-specific parental effects on the next generation, and (3) identify, in collaboration with stakeholders from aquaculture and fishery sectors, mitigation strategies that can mediate these effects. CAPWARM includes laboratory and field work on two valuable salmonid species for human consumption: the Rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, and the Atlantic Salmon, Salmo salar. The first accounts for 60% of EU freshwater fish farming, while the second is the first produced marine fish but is paradoxically declared at risk in most European waters. The results will be further discussed along with management practices available to mitigate parental thermal stress, in both aquaculture and wild contexts. CAPWARM outputs will be of high importance for fisheries, aquaculture, and conservation and fits with the climate action top priority of the EU.