June 9, 2026 — Professor Brooke Love was already studying the effects of ocean acidification on sea life, but wanted to look into some new tools to aid her studies. After Love received the National Science Foundation’s Mid-Career Advancement Grant in 2020, she decided to learn molecular tools such as mass spectrometry to explore a microscopic angle.
Soon after, she found a study by Paul McElhany, who was researching Dungeness crabs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
McElhany had found a difference in survivability between the offspring, or zoea, of multiple Dungeness crab mothers collected in different regions when living in water with a high concentration of CO2.
“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,” said Love, an environmental science professor who works both in Bellingham and at WWU’s Shannon Point Marine Center in Anacortes. “So it struck me as a really good opportunity to use some molecular tools to try to dig a little deeper and understand the mechanisms that led to the response that we found in that experiment.”
The NOAA group initially hypothesized that water conditions, such as oxygen and CO2 levels, at the sites where the crab mothers were collected could influence the zoeae’s survivability and resistance to ocean acidification (OA), but ultimately they found that location had less of an impact than matrilineal lineage.