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Abiotic extremes create unusual environments that are engaging to aquatic ecologists because of their novelty. Microorganisms that can live in almost boiling water and animals that can live in near-freezing water are fascinating. In addition to piquing academic interest, these habitats can provide insight into how organisms may tolerate pollution and other human-caused environmental perturbations. For example, studies on thermal pollution and global warming may require an understanding of how organisms cope with high temperatures, and organisms from saline lakes may provide clues to species’ responses to salinization by agricultural and urban runoff. Furthermore, aquatic microbial ecologists and biotechnologists have isolated useful microbes from extreme habitats, such as those that produce the enzymes essential for the polymerase chain reaction, an essential tool in modern molecular biology. In this chapter, we discuss how organisms adapt to different extremes and the environments in which the extremes occur. The extremes considered here include high and low temperatures, periodic drying, high salinity, surface layers of water (experiencing damagingly high light), and ultraoligotrophic waters. In the next chapter, we will discuss how human stressors, such as pollution, can have detrimental effects on organisms, and adaptations discussed in this chapter will be very relevant to those discussed in the next |
