Abstract - Climate Chaos: Can Calanus Copepods Cope? Adaptive genetic variation affects vulnerability to a changing climate in key fish prey.

With climate change altering all aspects of marine ecosystems, actionable management strategies to preserve marine ecosystem functioning, commercial fisheries and species at risk require knowledge of how and why species may be vulnerable to future climate change. From an evolutionary perspective, populations evolve differences that provide a fitness advantage under local environmental conditions. Predictions of expected evolutionary responses to future climates via evolutionary pathways can be achieved by studying the environmental drivers of genomic variation and then incorporating genomic information into climate change impact assessments to determine genomic vulnerability. In this study, we present evidence of environmentally mediated intraspecific genetic diversity in two species of Calanus copepod; C. finmarchicus (N=458) and C. hyperboreus (N = 233), both dominant zooplankton species of the North West Atlantic (NWA), and important prey for endangered whales and commercial fish species alike. Using RADseq genotyping and population genomic analysis across a strong environmental gradient, we identify local genetic adaptation, population structure (Atlantic, Arctic and Gulf of Saint Lawrence) and predict spatiotemporal shifts in genomic vulnerability under future climate scenarios with important implications for environmentally associated ecosystem change in the NWA.

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