The Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea virginica) is Texas’s most valuable coastal resource, providing critical habitat for fish and invertebrate species, shoreline stabilization, and improving water quality. The Texas oyster mariculture industry was created in 2019 to guide oyster growing operations and protect their valuable environment from ecological decline. Texas is the last Gulf of Mexico bordering state to allow an oyster aquaculture industry; however, by providing this economically important industry, Texas oyster growers can support their surrounding environments and provide income, jobs, and another source of seafood to coastal restaurants and communities. Over the next decade, Texas’ top commercial fishery will be threatened by population growth, coastal development, pollution, and flooding. These local threats will interact with global environmental changes (i.e., warming temperatures and acidification). With these valuable ecosystems in rapid decline and the birth of industry to restore and rehabilitate these ecosystems at the forefront of Texas’s economic opportunities, it is vital to understand the stress tolerances and adaptive capacities of the Eastern Oyster.
This Texas oyster population is divided into two genetically different sub-species found in the Northern and Southern regions of the state, with Corpus Christi Bay acting as the transition zone between the divergent populations. However, few scientific conclusions have been made regarding why there is such vast genetic variation between Texas’s two populations of oysters. Therefore, using an intermittent flow respirometry technique, this project will characterize the individual tolerance thresholds of the genetically different sub-populations to a range of salinities under high temperature. The results of this work aim to help predict future risk and resilience of the South Texas oyster population dynamics, aquaculture production, and restoration of ecosystem services. The risk assessment created will contribute to the resiliency of Texas’ coastal oyster reef habitats to climate change by filling the knowledge gap surrounding stress tolerances to dramatic salinity fluctuations and evaluating how the genetically different oyster populations will respond to interacting local and global stressors.