Microgadus tomcod transcriptome response to water temperature

This Bioproject was designed to evaluate the organismic and molecular effects of chronic exposure of Atlantic tomcod (Microgadus tomcod) early life-stages (embryos and larvae) to wintertime water temperatures that exceed those that currently exist in the Hudson River, but have been predicted to occur in the future under various projections of global warming of Hudson River waters. Atlantic tomcod is a cold water, estuarine finfish species with a broad distribution along the Atlantic coast of North America that historically extended from Labrador to Virginia. However, today the Hudson River hosts the southernmost spawning population of tomcod. Atlantic tomcod was the species chosen for this project because of the previously demonstrated sensitivity of their juvenile life stage to elevated water temperatures in controlled laboratory experiments and in field studies that monitored the abundance of Hudson River juveniles over several decades. These studies showed that recruitment to the adult population was negatively correlated with abnormally high summertime water temperatures experienced by young-of-the-year juveniles. Furthermore, as mean Hudson River water temperatures have increased over the past 50 years, the abundance of adults has decreased significantly which has led many resource managers to predict the extirpation of the Hudson River population in the near future. Thus, tomcod serve as an informative environmentally relevant model to explore the population level effects of global warming. This project is supported by internal funding of the Division of Environmental Medicine of the Department of Medicine of NYU Grossman School of Medicine.