Heatwaves have devastating effects on aquatic organisms and ecosystems. Fish are vulnerable to heatwaves because of the accelerating effect of temperature on their metabolism and the lower availability of oxygen in warmer water.
However, the evolutionary impacts of heatwaves are not well understood, particularly those arising from sublethal effects and genetic correlations between traits. The challenges of understanding heatwave-related fitness costs are exacerbated in diadromous species, in which population sizes have also broadly declined leading to conservation concerns. Atlantic salmon is vulnerable to climate change in both riverine and marine environments, but notably, their complex lifecycle also has a strong and simple genetic background. I will review how genetic variation controls key life-history traits in salmon, and present recent research on how heatwaves may shape salmon populations.
Bio
Jenni Prokkola is a senior scientist and research fellow at Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke). She completed her PhD in physiology and genomics of fish at the University of Turku in 2016. She continued to postdoctoral positions studying a range of topics from oxygen supply and fish behaviour to fishing-induced selection before researching salmon life history.
Her passion is to understand how the complex lifecycles of salmonid fishes have evolved and how they cope with climate change and other human-induced stressors. Her research team studies the impacts of heatwaves on salmon in experimental populations using different physiological approaches.
She is an incoming co-chair of ICES Working Group on Science to Support Conservation, Restoration and Management of Diadromous Species (WGDIAD) and a member of ICES Assessment Working Group on Baltic Salmon and Trout (WGBAST).
