UC Santa Barbara

Marine heatwave (MHW) events defined as prolonged periods of anomalously high seawater temperatures have emerged as influential and disruptive climate-change driven disturbances in coastal oceans, threatening marine biodiversity worldwide. As a physical phenomenon, MHW events are extreme disturbance events in coastal marine ecosystems and have impacted marine invertebrate communities. In coastal California, impacts of a major MHW in 2014 to 2016 included major declines in the kelp canopy biodiversity, high mortality of abalone, and altered biogeographic ranges of marine invertebrates. Recent modeling efforts suggest that MHW events will intensify in frequency and intensity in the future, with estimates that MHW events will become annual events under “business as-usual” emission scenarios. In this light, my dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the Hofmann Lab examined adult and early stages of an emerging shellfish fisheries species, a benthic gastropod, the Kellet’s whelk (Kelletia kelletii) in the ecological context of MHWs.