Hannes Baumann
University of Connecticut, CT·Ecology & Evolution
As the ocean warms and absorbs more carbon dioxide, which makes it more acidic, marine fish must either cope or adapt. Studying how fish populations have already adapted to natural temperature differences between warm and cold latitudes helps predict how species may evolve under climate change.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
ocean acidification
ocean warming
climate change
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test whether growth capacity in Chilean silversides increases with latitude and temperature (counter-gradient variation), by rearing offspring from four coastal sites at four common temperatures.
- Test whether vertebral number increases with latitude (co-gradient variation) in Chilean silversides, and combine these data with northern silverside species to relate adaptation strength to climate gradient strength.
- Determine whether Northern sand lance larvae are as sensitive to carbon dioxide as embryos, by rearing offspring of wild spawners under factorial CO2 × temperature conditions.
- Identify how high CO2 impairs hatching in sand lance, using RNAseq and RT-qPCR (methods that measure gene activity) focused on hatching enzymes.
- Test whether CO2 sensitivity has a genetic basis that could evolve, using low-coverage whole genome sequencing, allele frequency shifts and relatedness analyses, and compare with American sand lance.
More about the research
Testing which species are unusually sensitive to future conditions shows where ecosystems are most at risk. The research brings these two threads together in small coastal and offshore fishes.
Why it matters
Sand lances feed seabirds, marine mammals and fisheries across the Northwest Atlantic. Knowing why their embryos fail under high carbon dioxide, and whether they could evolve tolerance, could help predict and protect fishery-dependent ecosystems. Comparing silverside adaptation across climate gradients may improve forecasts of how ocean fish species evolve as the climate warms.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Expanding the silverside system to quantify how climate gradients determine co- and countergradient adaptation strength in the ocean
NSF · Aug 2023 – Jul 2027
ORCC: Collaborative Research: Mechanisms underpinning the unusual, high CO2 sensitivity of sand lances, key forage fishes on the Northwest Atlantic Shelf
NSF · Aug 2023 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
Carly Kenkel
University of Southern California, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether differences in staghorn coral shape plasticity are driven by changes in calcification and fine-scale skeletal deposition, using a lab water-flow experiment on clonal replicates of Acropora cervicornis genotypes.
Jonathan Puritz
University of Rhode Island, RI·Ecology & Evolution
Determine how eastern oyster larvae respond to short-term combinations of low dissolved oxygen, coastal acidification and low salinity, using factorial laboratory exposures at early and late larval stages and tracking survival alongside genotype.
Kathleen Lotterhos
Northeastern University, MA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Quantify genetic variation in cold tolerance, overwintering survival and post-winter reproduction, and the reaction norms of these traits in summer and winter morphs, using Drosophila suzukii flies from Vermont and Kentucky.
The school
University of Connecticut: 31 labs on PI Pages, $434M a year on research, 360 research doctorates a year.
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