Hansen, Miriam Lea Sarah (2016) Heat stress effects on sea anemone species from Northern Central Chile in the context of a heat wave simulation. (Master thesis), Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, Kiel, Germany, 23 pp.

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Abstract

The threat of global change and as a consequence thereof the warming of the oceans has driven many scientists to conduct thermal tolerance studies on marine organisms. One of the most commonly used methods to investigate heat stress resistance is the analysis of the thermal range of an organism. In this study we investigated exclusively the upper thermal tolerance limit. We compared the physiological effects of thermal stress between Anthothoe chilensis, a native Chilean sea anemone species from the rocky intertidal, and Anemonia alicemartinae, a cryptogenic species that also occurs in Chilean coastal waters. We conducted laboratory experiments and evaluated survival and organismal growth data. We found that the native species responds better than the cryptogenic species which stands in contrast to the findings of numerous other studies which suggest that non-native species cope better with thermal stress than native ones. These results have led to the conclusion that our native species A. chilensis may be a successful invader since it has already been recorded from other regions across the globe and that the so far considered as cryptogenic species A. alicemartinae may even be native to the Chilean coast.

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