—to adapt over twenty generations, evolving to maintain their fitness in a radically changed environment. The team's observations support the idea that copepods—a globally-distributed group of crustaceans eaten by many commercially important fish species—could be resilient to the unprecedented rapid warming and acidification now being unleashed in the oceans by human fossil-fuel use.
Copepods are small crustaceans found in nearly every freshwater and marine habitat—and they may be the most abundant animals in the ocean. UVM scientists studied one species of them, Acartia tonsa, to test how they would respond to climate change. Credit: Andrei Savitskygenetic variation
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