Main drivers of fecundity variability of mussels along a latitudinal gradient: Lessons to apply for future climate change scenarios

17 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables.-- This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License

Bivalve relevance for ecosystem functioning and human food security emphasize the importance of predictions of mussel performance under different climate stressors. Here, we address the effect of a latitudinal gradient of temperature and food availability on the fecundity of the Mediterranean mussel to try to better parameterize environmental forcing over reproductive output. We show that temperature plays a major role, acting as a switching on–off mechanism for gametogenesis, while food availability has a lower influence but also modulates the number of gametes produced. Temperature and food availability also show different effects over fecundity depending on the temporal scale evaluated. Our results support the view that the gametogenesis responds non-linearly with temperature and chlorophyll concentration, an issue that is largely overlooked in growth, production and energy budgets of bivalve populations, leading to predictive models that can overestimate the capability of the mussel’s populations to deal with climate change future scenarios

This study is part of the ‘Larval Sources-Assessing the ecological performance of marine protected area networks’ research project, funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia-FCT/MCTES (PTDC/BIA-BIC/120483/2010). Financial support was allocated under the COMPETE Programme, which includes components from the European Regional Development Fund and from the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior. Thanks are also due to FCT/MCTES for the financial support to CESAM (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020), through national funds. G.F.O. was supported by a grant from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior–Brasil (CAPES)–Finance Code 001, grant number 13724/13-4 L.G.P. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from Xunta de Galicia, Spain (POS-B/2016/032) during the field work and by a Talento Senior Grant (16_IN585A_2020_986937) during the writing of the manuscript. H.S. was supported by a grant from the Erasms Mundus Master of Science in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

Peer reviewed