MANINI

Our main hypothesis is that fish larval recruitment is controlled by TH and can be altered by anthropogenic stressors disrupting TH signaling. This will provide a general framework to better understand, at the molecular level, how water pollution and more generally human activities resulting in global changes, can threaten reef ecosystems. In particular, this suggests that different anthropogenic stressors can lead to a common effect: the disruption of an endocrine pathway. It is well known that endocrine disruption has several major features such as nonlinear dose-response relationship, time lags between exposure and effect, or transgenerational effects. Therefore, if anthropogenic stressors converge on TH signalling disruption, this can led to a major shift in our understanding of the effects of climate change on natural animal populations. In addition, this basic knowledge will also be translated to conservation biology aspects. Our model suggests that the in vivo measure of TH signalling level in natural populations could provide an endpoint to characterize the degree to which a given fish population is affected by global change.