C3 Seminar: Juan Diego Gaitan-Espitia

Assessing the role of physiological plasticity and local adaptation to ocean warming and acidification

Environmental change is a potential source of new or intensified directional selection on traits with important implications for fitness. These changes in selection pressures could involve different ecological and evolutionary responses from natural populations: Excluding local extinction, organisms can respond in three ways to climate change:

1. they can disperse to more hospitable environments, (i.e. “migration”);
2. they can exhibit acclimatory (reversible) responses to short-term changes in environmental conditions (i.e., “phenotypic flexibility”); and/or
3. populations can adapt to the environmental changes by mean of genetic changes through evolutionary processes (i.e., adaptive evolution). In this talk I am going to describe the use of different approaches (ecophysiology, quantitative-genetics and transcriptomics) to study adaptive microevolutionary processes in marine organisms under a Climate Change context.

About the speaker

Dr Juan Diego Gaitan-Espitia
CSIRO-Hobart

I’m a marine biologist from Colombia with a PhD in Ecology and Evolution. Currently, I’m a postdoc at CSIRO working on marine genomics and climate change with phytoplankton species. I’m particularly interested in the understanding of adaptive evolution of physiological traits in response to anthropogenic changes such as ocean acidification and warming.