Research Group
The FishGlob biodiversity synthesis group has created a database comprised of 26 public scientific bottom trawl surveys into a user interface. This is the first known database of this depth with special interest in demersal fish surveys. Collectively, the database includes over 230,000 hauls with more than 2,000 fish taxa from 1963 to 2020, from the North Atlantic and the Northwest Pacific continental shelves and slopes. The FishGlob pre-print can be found here.
After a 2-year hiatus, the Pinsky lab finally made it back to the Philippines! Brendan, René, Kyra, Marial & Allison recently returned from a trip to Dumaguete, Negros Oriental where they engaged in research and education endeavors as part of an NSF-funded PIRE project investigating Centennial Genetic and Species Transformations in the Epicenter of Marine Biodiversity. While there, the team helped with fieldwork to assess changes in species diversity, and participated in a 5-day bioinformatics and genomics workshop hosted at Silliman University.
Lab members also participated in excursions to explore the culture and natural beauty of the Philippines. Excursions included snorkeling and scuba diving at Apo Island and exploring waterfalls and hot springs. They also met with Filipino collaborators and visited local markets and restaurants.
We are very excited to announce the launch of our project website: futureblue.net. FutureBlue is an online database and mapping platform designed to make projections of future ocean conditions (species distributions, wind speed, oceanography, etc.) available and useful for the broadest array of stakeholders possible. The project is led by Rutgers, UCONN, and The Nature Conservancy, along with a large interdisciplinary team from academic, governmental, and non-profit organizations, including world experts in climate science, social science, oceanography, marine ecology and management, and online data portal development. FutureBlue originated as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator program in 2021, and we are currently in the process of securing funding for Phase II to expand and improve the tool.
A new paper in Global Change Biology documents how Tiger Shark migrations have shifted poleward in response to 40 years of ocean warming. Notably, this has left the species more exposed to commercial fishing as its expanded range is largely outside of a protected area for the species. It may also increase the rate of negative encounters between sharks and human beachgoers. The work is the result of a collaboration between researchers at U. Miami, Mississippi State, NOAA, the Pinsky Lab at Rutgers University, and others. Read the full paper here and watch a short video on it here.
René Clark (Ph.D. candidate) and co-authors from the Pinsky Lab, Montclair State University, Columbia University, UCLA, Shiga University (Japan), and Visayas State University (Philippines) published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B investigating the relationship between selection, gene flow and genetic drift across the species range of Amphiprion clarkii (the yellowtail clownfish). Using RNAseq data from populations near the range center (Indonesia & the Philippines) and the northern range margin (Japan), they found signs of local adaptation to cold temperatures at the range edge, despite strong genetic drift and gene flow from lower latitudes. Many of the targets of selection were found in genes involved in acclimation to cold stress, including protein turnover, metabolism, cell structure, and cell death, and may point to an important link between plastic and evolutionary responses involved in thermal adaptation.
This article was adapted from Todd Bates’ press release.
Overfishing likely did not cause the Atlantic cod, an iconic species, to evolve genetically and mature earlier, according to a study led by Drs. Malin Pinsky and Bastiaan Star.
“Evolution has been used in part as an excuse for why cod and other species have not recovered from overfishing,” said Malin. “Our findings suggest instead that more attention to reducing fishing and addressing other environmental changes, including climate change, will be important for allowing recovery. We can’t use evolution as a scapegoat for avoiding the hard work that would allow cod to recover.”
The study, which focuses on Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) off Newfoundland in Canada and off Norway, appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Many debates over the last few decades have centered on whether cod have evolved in response to fisheries, a phenomenon known as fisheries-induced evolution. Cod now mature at a much earlier age, for example. The concern has been that if the fish have evolved, they may not be able to recover even if fishing is reduced, according to Pinsky.
Cod populations with late-maturing individuals can produce more offspring and more effectively avoid predators, he said. They are also better protected against climate variability.
Both theory and experiments suggest that fishing can lead to an earlier maturation age. But prior to the new study, no one had tried to sequence whole genomes from before intensive fishing to determine whether evolution had occurred. So, this team sequenced cod earbones and scales from 1907 in Norway, 1940 in Canada and modern cod from the same populations. The northern Canadian population of cod collapsed from overfishing in the early 1990s, while the northeast Arctic population near Norway faced high fishing rates but smaller declines.
The team found no major losses in genetic diversity and no major changes that suggested intensive fishing induced evolution, suggesting that we focus on managing for more direct threats (e.g., overfishing, environmental change) than for evolution.
This study prompts future investigations to see if other species, especially those with shorter lifespans (in contrast to cod), do or don’t show signs of evolution.
Scientists at the University of Oslo, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Institute of Marine Research (Norway), University of Basel and University of Zurich contributed to the study.
This post is adapted from Todd Bates‘ article in Rutgers Today.
Former Pinsky Lab Post-doc, Dr. Sarah Gignoux-Wolfsohn led a study in Molecular Ecology which uncovered the genetic differences between bats killed by white-nose syndrome and bats that survived. She was supported by a team of co-authors from Rutgers (Dr. Malin Pinsky, Dr. Kathleen Kerwin, and Dr. Brooke Maslo), the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, the NJ Department of Enviornmental Protection, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, and the University of Tennessee. Their results suggest that survivors pass on traits for resistance to the fungal disease causing rapid evolution in exposed bat populations.
White-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats in North America since 2006, following its introduction from Europe. The syndrome, caused by the fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans, is arguably the most catastrophic wildlife disease in history. It has led to unprecedented declines in many North American bat species, including the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus).
“Our finding that little brown bat populations have evolved, which could be why they survived, has large implications for management of bat populations going forward,” said lead author Sarah Gignoux-Wolfsohn, a former postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University–New Brunswick now at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland. “Management decisions, such as whether to treat for white-nose syndrome or protect populations from other detrimental factors, can be informed by knowing which bats are genetically resistant to the disease.”
“The deployment of vaccines or treatments for the fungus may be most needed in populations with few disease-resistant individuals,” said Gignoux-Wolfsohn, who led the study – published in the journal Molecular Ecology – while at Rutgers. “Our study also has implications for other diseases that cause mass mortality. While rapid evolution in response to these diseases is often difficult to detect, our study suggests it may be more common than previously thought.”
The team sequenced bat genomes from three hibernating colonies in abandoned mines in New York, New Jersey and Vermont to determine whether little brown bats evolved as a result of the disease. They compared the genomes of bats killed by white-nose syndrome to survivors in recovering populations to identify genetic differences that may be responsible for survival.
The bats’ evolution appears to have particularly affected genes associated with weight gain before hibernation and behavior during hibernation. Rapid evolution may have allowed the remaining bats to keep hibernating and survive infection that killed off millions of other bats.
“Evolution is often thought of as a process that happened long ago,” Gignoux-Wolfsohn said. “We have found that it has also been happening right in our backyards and barns over the last decade.”
This group is now conducting a similar study in Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis). While also affected by white-nose syndrome, this species has experienced lesser declines than little brown bats.
Read the article in Molecular Ecology.
Read additional news coverage in Rutgers Today and Yahoo! News.
A new paper published in Nature Climate Change by Dr. Michael Burrows et al., with contributions from Dr. Ryan Batt (former Pinsky Lab postdoc) and Dr. Malin Pinsky, used 29 years of fish and plankton survey data to assess how warming is changing marine communities’ composition and structure. They found that “warm-water species are rapidly increasing and cold-water species are decreasing” as ocean waters warm. Informed by species’ incidence, and changes in sea surface temperature (SST), the team created measures of species’ thermal affinities, community composition, and other summary metrics. They used these to measure community-level change in thermal affinity and composition.
Regions with relatively stable temperatures (e.g. the Northeast Pacific and Gulf of Mexico) showed little change in structure, while areas that warmed (e.g. the North Atlantic) shifted strongly towards warm-water species dominance. They also found that communities whose species pools had diverse thermal affinities and a narrower range of thermal tolerance showed greater sensitivity to change.
Next, they found that communities in regions with strong temperature depth gradients changed less than expected. In these regions, rather than moving horizontally through the water, species can instead move deeper to maintain their preferred temperature.
They concluded that this evidence strongly supports temperature as a fundamental driver of change in marine systems, and that metrics based on species’ thermal affinities are useful tools to predict and provide prognoses for community dominance shifts.
Check out press coverage of the article below:
Changes in the total catch of a species do not always correspond to changes in total biomass or changes in the species’ distribution alone. This discrepancy drove Dr. Rebecca Selden, former Pinsky lab post-doc and current Assistant Professor at Wesleyan College, and colleagues to seek a greater understanding of the forces driving both fish stock availability and catch at US West Coast ports in their recently published article.
The team first sought to couple changes in a species’ biomass with the species’ distribution to explain the heterogeneity in stock availability experienced by fisheries across different latitudes. They measured the change in distribution and biomass of five commercial target species (dover sole, thornyheads, sablefish, lingcod, and petrale sole), and found that the timing and magnitude of stock declines and recoveries are not experienced uniformly along the coast when they coincide with shifts in species distributions.
Second, they integrated information on distances travelled by fishers with estimates of availability along the coast to generate port-specific indices of availability. They found that additional factors, like greater vessel mobility and larger areal extent of fish habitat, affect availability, and may work to counteract or augment the effects of changing fish biomass and distribution.
Lastly, they found that higher stock availability was not consistently associated with higher catch per ticket. Because fish landings were not consistently related to stock availability, Selden et al. suggest that social, economic, and regulatory factors likely constrain or facilitate the capacity for fishers to adapt to changes in fish availability.
Drs. Timothy Walsworth, Daniel Schindler, Madhavi Colton, Michael Webster, Stephen Palumbi, Peter Mumby, Timothy Essington, and Malin Pinsky authored a paper exploring the efficacy of various management strategies to protect species in the face of warming ocean temperatures. While previous research addressed where to establish protected areas, nearly all studies overlooked the fact that most species can also evolve in response to climate change, despite growing evidence that rapid evolutionary response can occur. The paper focused in particular on corals.
The team evaluated a range of potential conservation strategies, including protecting: 1) the hottest 2) the coldest and 3) both the hottest and coldest sites at the time of site selection; sites with the 4) highest and 5) lowest abundance at the time of site selection; 6) sites that are evenly spaced across the entire network, and 7) randomly selected sites about the networks. The researchers found that strategies conserving many different kinds of sites would work best (e.g. 6 and 7).
“Rather than conserving just the cold places with corals, we found that the best strategies will conserve a wide diversity of sites,” Malin explained. “Hot reefs are important sources of heat-tolerant corals, while cold sites and those in between are important future refuges and stepping stones for corals as the water heats up.”
Click to read the full article
Press coverage: