Impact of hyposalinity on the barrens-forming sea urchin Centrostephanus rodgersii in context with flooding events.

The sea urchin Centrostephanus rodgersii is an ecologically important species in southeastern Australia, where its grazing contributes to the formation of macroalgal-free barrens habitat. While climate warming has facilitated this species southward range extension, climate change is also causing an increase in the frequency of storm-driven hyposalinity events. These events can expose marine organisms to acute or gradual decrease salinity stress, depending on the rate and duration of freshwater influx.

Pre-gestational diabetes in a young woman with a pathogenic INSR missense mutation, p.(Met1180Lys).

Summary: Heterozygous insulin receptor (INSR) mutations cause type A insulin resistance (IR), associated with a phenotype of IR; hyperandrogenism, oligomenorrhoea and acanthosis nigricans in the absence of obesity or lipoatrophy. The phenotype is variable, ranging from neonatal hyperinsulinaemic hypoglycaemia to fasting or post-prandial hypoglycaemia in adults to diabetes. We report a 29-year-old woman presenting at 13 weeks gestation in her second pregnancy.

Revered and Reviled: The Plight of the Vanishing Sea Cucumbers.

Sea cucumbers paradoxically suffer from being both highly prized and commonly disregarded. As an Asian medicine and delicacy, they command fabulous prices and are thus overfished, poached, and trafficked. As noncharismatic animals, many are understudied and inadequately protected.

Meta-analyses reveal climate change impacts on an ecologically and economically significant oyster in Australia.

Global oceans are warming and acidifying because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions that are anticipated to have cascading impacts on marine ecosystems and organisms, especially those essential for biodiversity and food security. Despite this concern, there remains some skepticism about the reproducibility and reliability of research done to predict future climate change impacts on marine organisms. Here, we present meta-analyses of over two decades of research on the climate change impacts on an ecologically and economically valuable Sydney rock oyster, .

Single-Cell Transcriptomics Reveals Evolutionary Reconfiguration of Embryonic Cell Fate Specification in the Sea Urchin Heliocidaris erythrogramma.

Altered regulatory interactions during development likely underlie a large fraction of phenotypic diversity within and between species, yet identifying specific evolutionary changes remains challenging. Analysis of single-cell developmental transcriptomes from multiple species provides a powerful framework for unbiased identification of evolutionary changes in developmental mechanisms. Here, we leverage a "natural experiment" in developmental evolution in sea urchins, where a major life history switch recently evolved in the lineage leading to Heliocidaris erythrogramma, precipitating extensive changes in early development.

Antarctic cushion star Odontaster validus larval performance is negatively impacted by long-term parental acclimation to elevated temperature.

Cross-generational responses, when the parents' environment influences offspring performance, may contribute to species resilience to climate change in rapidly warming regions such as coastal Antarctica. Adult Antarctic sea stars Odontaster validus were conditioned in the laboratory to two temperature treatments (ambient, 0 °C and warming, +3 °C) for two years, and their gametes were used to generate larval offspring. The response of their larvae to five temperatures (0 °C, 1 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C, and 4 °C) was examined over 145 days.

Contrasting the development of larval and adult body plans during the evolution of biphasic lifecycles in sea urchins.

Biphasic lifecycles are widespread among animals, but little is known about how the developmental transition between larvae and adults is regulated. Sea urchins are a unique system for studying this phenomenon because of the stark differences between their bilateral larval and pentaradial adult body plans. Here, we use single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze the development of Heliocidaris erythrogramma (He), a sea urchin species with an accelerated, non-feeding mode of larval development.

Antagonistic Effects of Light Pollution and Warming on Habitat-Forming Seaweeds.

Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) is an emerging global stressor that is likely to interact with other stressors such as warming, affecting habitat-forming species and ecological functions. Seaweeds are dominant habitat-forming species in temperate marine ecosystems, where they support primary productivity and diverse ecological communities. Warming is a major stressor affecting seaweed forests, but effects of ALAN on seaweeds are largely unknown.

Reprint: Acclimatization and Adaptive Capacity of Marine Species in a Changing Ocean.

To persist in an ocean changing in temperature, pH and other stressors related to climate change, many marine species will likely need to acclimatize or adapt to avoid extinction. If marine populations possess adequate genetic variation in tolerance to climate change stressors, species might be able to adapt to environmental change. Marine climate change research is moving away from single life stage studies where individuals are directly placed into projected scenarios ('future shock' approach), to focus on the adaptive potential of populations in an ocean that will gradually change over coming decades.

The 2024 roadmap for understanding marine species' resilience in a changing ocean.

Written to serve as a guideline for future research in this field, this roadmap provides some perspectives on the main developments and remaining challenges in the field of marine animal acclimatisation, adaptive potential and resilience to climate change. There has been extensive research conducted on the impact of climate change stress on marine animals, with studies recognising the potential for cross- and multi- generational impacts. Parents can potentially pass on resilience to offspring.

Dead foundation species create coral rubble habitat that benefits a resilient pest species.

Critical loss of habitat is the greatest threat to biodiversity, yet some species are inherently plastic to and may even benefit from changes in ecosystem states. The crown-of-thorns sea star (CoTS; Acanthaster spp.) may be one such organism.

Ocean warming and Marine Heatwaves unequally impact juvenile introduced and native oysters with implications for their coexistence and future distribution.

Climate change is causing ocean warming (OW) and increasing the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events, including Marine Heat Waves (MHWs). Both OW and MHWs pose a significant threat to marine ecosystems and marine organisms, including oysters, oyster reefs and farmed oysters. We investigated the survival and growth of juveniles of two commercial species of oyster, the Sydney rock oyster, Saccostrea glomerata, and the Pacific oyster, Crassostrea gigas, to elevated seawater temperatures reflecting a moderate and an extreme MHW in context with recent MHWs and beyond.

Evolution of Maternal Provisioning and Development in the Ophiuroidea: Egg Size, Larval Form, and Parental Care.

The Ophiuroidea is the most speciose class of echinoderms and has the greatest diversity of larval forms, but we know less about the evolution of development (evo-devo) in this group than for the other echinoderm classes. As is typical of echinoderms, evo-devo in the Ophiuroidea resulted in the switch from production of small eggs and feeding (planktotrophic) larvae to large eggs and non-feeding (lecithotrophic) larvae. Parental care (ovoviviparity or viviparity/matrotrophy) is the most derived life history.

Taxa-dependent temporal trends in the abundance and size of sea urchins in subtropical eastern Australia.

Subtropical reefs host a dynamic mix of tropical, subtropical, and temperate species that is changing due to shifts in the abundance and distribution of species in response to ocean warming. In these transitional communities, biogeographic affinity is expected to predict changes in species composition, with projected increases of tropical species and declines in cool-affinity temperate species. Understanding population dynamics of species along biogeographic transition zones is critical, especially for habitat engineers such as sea urchins that can facilitate ecosystem shifts through grazing.

Crown-of-thorns seastar (Acanthaster spp.) feeding ecology across species and regions.

The coral predators, crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS, Acanthaster spp.) remain a major cause of extensive and widespread coral loss in Indo-Pacific coral reefs. With increased phylogenetic understanding of these seastars, at least five species appear to be present across different regions.

Artificial light at night and warming impact grazing rates and gonad index of the sea urchin .

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is a growing threat to coastal habitats, and is likely to exacerbate the impacts of other stressors. Kelp forests are dominant habitats on temperate reefs but are declining due to ocean warming and overgrazing. We tested the independent and interactive effects of ALAN (dark versus ALAN) and warming (ambient versus warm) on grazing rates and gonad index of the sea urchin Within these treatments, urchins were fed either 'fresh' kelp or 'treated' kelp.

Evo-Devo in Ophiuroids: The Switch from Planktotrophy to Lecithotrophy in .

AbstractUnderstanding the evolution of development (evo-devo) in the Ophiuroidea and the pathways in the switch from a feeding to a nonfeeding larva is complicated by the variability in the phenotype of the metamorphic larva, being a reduced yolky ophiopluteus in some species (type I development) and a vitellaria larva in others (type II development). We investigated evo-devo in the family Ophionereididae, a group dominated by lecithotrophic development through a vitellaria larva. We reared the planktotrophic larvae of to settlement to determine the metamorphic phenotype.

Prevalence of the scuticociliate Orchitophrya stellarum in seastars from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

As part of a study to investigate the use of the scuticociliate Orchitophrya stellarum as a biological control for the invasive seastar Asterias amurensis in Australia, we collected prevalence data for O. stellarum from 3 seastar species (A. amurensis, A.