Water temperature and disease alters bacterial diversity and cultivability from American lobster () shells.

The American lobster, , is an economically valuable and ecologically important crustacean along the North Atlantic coast of North America. Populations in southern locations have declined in recent decades due to increasing ocean temperatures and disease, and these circumstances are progressing northward. We monitored 57 adult female lobsters, healthy and shell diseased, under three seasonal temperature cycles for a year, to track shell bacterial communities using culturing and 16S rRNA gene sequencing, progression of epizootic shell disease using visual assessment, and antimicrobial activity of hemolymph.

Larval salmon lice Lepeophtheirus salmonis exhibit behavioral responses to conspecific pre-adult and adult cues.

In the larval stage of the parasitic copepod Lepeophtheirus salmonis, the free-living copepodid must locate and settle on a salmonid host. Chemosensory mechanisms play a role in determining whether a potential host is suitable for attachment, yet the full suite of chemical cues and resulting behavioral mechanisms used are unknown. After maturing, pre-adult female and adult male salmon lice aggregate upon salmonid hosts for reproduction.

Many Questions Remain Unanswered About the Role of Microbial Transmission in Epizootic Shell Disease in American Lobsters ().

Despite decades of research on lobster species' biology, ecology, and microbiology, there are still unresolved questions about the microbial communities which associate in or on lobsters under healthy or diseased states, microbial acquisition, as well as microbial transmission between lobsters and between lobsters and their environment. There is an untapped opportunity for metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomics to be added to the existing wealth of knowledge to more precisely track disease transmission, etiology, and host-microbe dynamics. Moreover, we need to gain this knowledge of wild lobster microbiomes before climate change alters environmental and host-microbial communities more than it likely already has, throwing a socioeconomically critical industry into disarray.

Coping with stress in a warming Gulf: the postlarval American lobster's cellular stress response under future warming scenarios.

The Gulf of the Maine (GoM) is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world, posing serious physiological challenges to its marine inhabitants. Marine organisms can cope with the cellular and molecular stresses created by climate change through changes in gene expression. We used transcriptomics to examine how exposure to current summer temperatures (16 °C) or temperature regimes reflective of projected moderate and severe warming conditions (18 °C and 22 °C, respectively) during larval development alters expression of transcripts affiliated with the cellular stress response (CSR) in postlarval American lobsters (Homarus americanus).

Expected ocean warming conditions significantly alter the transcriptome of developing postlarval American lobsters (Homarus americanus): Implications for energetic trade-offs.

The American lobster (Homarus americanus) is one of the most iconic and economically valuable fishery species in the Northwestern Atlantic. Surface ocean temperatures are rapidly increasing across much of the species' range, raising concern about resiliency in the face of environmental change. Warmer temperatures accelerate rates of larval development and enhance survival to the postlarval stage, but the potential costs at the molecular level have rarely been addressed.