Changes in global mean sea surface temperature may have potential negative implications for natural and socioeconomic systems; however, measurements to predict trends in different regions have been limited and sometimes contradictory. In this study, an assessment of sea surface temperature change signals in the seas off Mexico is presented and compared to other regions and the world ocean, and to selected basin scale climatic indices of the North Pacific, the Atlantic and the tropical Pacific variability. We identified eight regions with different exposure to climate variability: In the Pacific, the west coast of the Baja California peninsula with mostly no trend, the Gulf of California with a modest cooling trend during the last 20 to 25 years, the oceanic area with the most intense recent cooling trend, the southern part showing an intense warming trend, and a band of no trend setting the boundary between North-Pacific and tropical-Pacific variability patterns; in the Atlantic, the northeast Gulf of Mexico shows cooling, while the western Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean have been warming for more than three decades. Potential interactions with fisheries and coastal sensitive ecosystems are discussed

Transcriptional regulation constitutes a rapid response of marine organisms facing stressful environmental conditions, such as the concomitant exposure to warming, ocean acidification and hypoxia under climate change. In previous studies, we investigated whole-organism physiological patterns and cellular metabolism in gill and muscle of the marine gastropod Haliotis fulgens in response to increasing temperature (18 °C to 32 °C at +3 °C per day) under hypoxia (50% air saturation), hypercapnia (1000 μatm pCO2) and both factors combined. Here, we report investigations of the molecular responses of H. fulgens to temperature and identify mechanisms concomitantly affected by hypoxia and hypercapnia. A de novo transcriptome assembly with subsequent quantitative PCR and correlation network analysis of genes involved in the molecular response were used to unravel the correlations between gene expression patterns under the different experimental conditions. The correlation networks identified a shift from the expression of genes involved in energy metabolism (down-regulated) to the up-regulation of Hsp70 during warming under all experimental conditions in gill and muscle, indicating a strong up-regulation of damage prevention and repair systems at sustained cellular energy production. However, a higher capacity for anaerobic succinate production was evicted in gill, matching with observations from our previous studies indicating succinate accumulation in gill but not in muscle. Additionally, warming under hypoxia and hypercapnia kept mRNA levels of citrate synthase in both tissues unchanged following a similar pattern as muscle enzyme capacity from a previous study, suggesting an emphasis on maintaining rather than down-regulating mitochondrial activity.