C. nucula is a Mediterranean species that can be easily farmed due to its ability of reproducing quickly by fragmentation [24] and also because it is a strong competitor for space [25], [26], [27].
This section concerns me. It details that C. nucula has all the capacity required to become an invasive species. My concern is that the sponges planted for bioremediation might grow out of control and present an entirely new set of issues.
Such variability, as well as the presence of negative clearance rates, might be due both to local differences in bacterial concentration when sampling water aliquots and to actual changes in filtering activity and/or water transport by sponges over time [3], [14], [39].
With such great amounts of variability, would this sponge actually make a good candidate for bioremediation? Or would it fluctuate too much to truly help?
If confirmed, this would implicate speciation mechanisms less closely tied to ecological opportunity than in the tilapiine cichlids of Lake Barombi Mbo and the precursors of the modern haplochromines in the Lake Tanganyika radiation. Mbuna, like Lake Victoria haplochromines, are extremely sexually dimorphic in coloration and very diverse in male colour patterns. It is conceivable that the interaction of drift and sexual selection in subdivided populations is responsible for much of this sustained rapid speciation (Dominey 1984).
How would a different mechanism for speciation than what was originally thought affect a potential phylogenetic tree? Any genome sequencing efforts? What we know about these fish as a whole?
Clearly, there are numerous situations where populations failed to radiate despite inhabiting environments apparently conducive to adaptive radiation. Understanding, and being able to predict, when adaptive radiation does and does not occur will perhaps provide the strongest test of theories of ecological speciation and adaptive radiation during the next decade.
Why did some populations fail to radiate? Will these potential predictions of future adaptive radiation drive any more conservation efforts of the African cichlids?
First, ocean acidification does not exist in isolation of other changing abiotic parameters and we are only beginning to understand the role of pCO2 in modulating how organisms simultaneously respond and potentially evolve to changes in other key drivers such as temperature or oxidative stress 7, 14, 19, 38, 39, 40. Genetic correlations and evolutionary trade-offs between environmental drivers can greatly modify how evolution proceeds (Box 2); thus multiple drivers need to be investigated.
How do these multiple drivers interact with each other? Does one have more impact on the environment as a whole than the other? Do certain drivers have greater effects on certain species? How can we keep all of these drivers in balance?
These estimates are expected to be barely affected by plasticity due to environmental factors, because the shelled embryos were sampled while being inside the brood pouch of their mother and they were not directly exposed to the natural environment (Conde-Padín et al., 2007).
How would the phenotypic variations have been expressed differently if the shelled embryos had been sampled after they had left the brood pouch?
Recently, multiple paternity has been detected in L. saxatilis (Panova et al., 2010). Females carried embryos from 15 to 23 different males, then a considerable proportion of the embryos would be half-sibs.
Would taking into account the multiple paternity skew the results of the phenotypic variation?
In some cases, temperature exacerbates the impact of ocean acidification (Rodolfo-Metalpa et al., 2011), or in other cases, elevated temperature completely removes the negative impacts of elevated pCO2 (Ko et al., 2014).
Why does temperature exacerbate ocean acidification in some cases but negate it in others? Does location make a difference? Type of habitat? Weather patterns? Local human activity?
Warming caused crustaceans to actively avoid M. galloprovincialis (Table 1). Conversely, at ambient temperature, polychaetes actively avoided M. galloprovincialis but showed no behavioural preferences under warming. For molluscs, at ambient temperature, they actively chose to colonise T. hirsuta, but under warming, their preference was altered to actively choose M. galloprovincialis
Why does changing the temperature from ambient to warming cause such drastic behavioral changes in the infauna colonizing the different species of mussels?