Through the CAFE summer scholars program, I worked along Chris Dwane and Brian Cheng to understand thermal tolerance is multiple New England Rocky Shore species. Anthropogenic climate change is one of the biggest problems nature is facing right now. As temperatures warm, many living animals are threatened with extinction. While we can predict how climate will change, how do we predict how this change will affect certain animal populations? A lot of our current understanding on species vulnerability to climate change is largely derived from physiological studies that focus on single taxa. A primary belief of ecology is that there are species interactions within a community, so a community perspective is critical in understanding how climate change will affect biota. The aim of this study is to find a method that would allow us to predict population decline due to climate change among different animal populations. Our objective is to use heart rate to determine thermal performance of 4 different marine invertebrates species and evaluate if there are physiological differences in these interacting species.
