A Western Washington University environmental science professor is using molecular tools to investigate one of the Pacific Northwest's most commercially important species. Professor Brooke Love, who splits her work between WWU's Bellingham campus and Shannon Point Marine Center in Anacortes, is leading research that aims to understand why some Dungeness crab offspring survive in increasingly acidic ocean conditions while others do not.
The research builds on a puzzle first identified by Paul McElhany at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. McElhany's team collected Dungeness crab mothers from different regions of the Pacific Coast and found striking differences in how their larvae, called zoea, survived when exposed to elevated CO2 levels in the water. Some crab mothers produced zoea that were highly resilient. Others produced zoea that died at elevated rates. But no one knew why.
"There was this really interesting story where some crab moms produced zoea that survived well, and others produced zoea that didn't survive well. But we didn't know anything about why," Love said. The mystery drew her in. After receiving the National Science Foundation's Mid-Career Advancement Grant in 2020, Love decided to expand her toolkit and learn mass spectrometry, a technique used to identify and measure proteins within biological samples.
The research approach Love is using is called proteomics, which involves cataloging the full suite of proteins expressed within a cell or tissue under specific conditions. Different proteins are activated depending on environmental stress, and by comparing protein profiles between zoea that survived and those that did not, researchers can begin to identify the molecular mechanisms that underpin resilience. This is meaningfully more detailed than examining survival rates alone, because it points to the biological levers that could eventually be used to understand population-level responses to ocean change.
Ocean acidification is a direct consequence of rising atmospheric CO2. As the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, the water becomes chemically more acidic, disrupting the ability of shellfish and crustaceans to build and maintain their shells. For Dungeness crab, which supports one of the most economically significant commercial fisheries on the West Coast, understanding the species' resilience to acidification is not just an academic question. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and coastal tribal fishing communities have a direct stake in how Dungeness crab populations respond to changing ocean chemistry over the coming decades.
Interestingly, Love's early results suggest that location matters less than lineage. The NOAA team initially hypothesized that the water conditions where crab mothers were collected, including oxygen and CO2 levels, would predict the survivability of their offspring. But the data pointed instead to matrilineal inheritance as a stronger factor. Zoea from certain mothers consistently survived better regardless of where those mothers had been collected. The protein-level analysis Love is conducting aims to identify what is biologically different about those resilient maternal lineages.
Support from the Washington Ocean Acidification Center allowed Love to bring WWU undergraduate Rhiannon Holmes onto the project as an intern. Undergraduate involvement in this kind of research is a hallmark of WWU's science programs, which provide students with hands-on research experience that few other regional universities can match at the undergraduate level.
The work being done at WWU's Shannon Point Marine Center in Anacortes represents the kind of applied marine science the Pacific Northwest will need as ocean conditions continue to shift. For more on how Bellingham-area institutions are approaching environmental challenges, community conservation efforts at Birch Bay show how local stewardship connects to larger ecological questions.
Full details on the research are available through the WWU news site, and the findings are expected to contribute to the growing body of knowledge informing West Coast fishery management and ocean acidification response strategies.
