"A present challenge in global change research is to determine and understand how multiple environmental stressors combine to affect individuals, populations and ecosystems. In the marine habitat, stressors appear to strongly affect the larval stages. Most aquatic animals develop through dispersive larval stages, highly vulnerable, that must survive and recruit to the adult stocks in order to ensure population persistence; failures in recruitment lead to population extinction. However, organisms differ in their life history strategy and habitat use, even if they are closely related; these differences may have profound effects on responses to stress. The objective of this proposal is to evaluate the combined role of climate driven variables (salinity, temperature) and anthropogenic compounds (pharmaceuticals) on aquatic animals with different life history strategy. Both salinity and temperature are forced by climate; concentrations of pharmaceuticals have been determined in coastal waters only recently and constitute an “unknown” as a source of larval mortality. The hypothesis is that larval responses to a combination of temperature, salinity and concentration of pharmaceuticals will depend on the life history. This will be tested using three closely related species of European shrimp (Palaemon serratus, P. longirostris and Palaemonetes varians) with different life history. These are economically relevant estuarine-coastal shrimp, exposed to important environmental variability. The project will follow a modern comparative experimental approach evaluating the performance of larvae characterized by different functional traits. This proposal works on multidisciplinary aspects with tools from ecology, biochemistry and modeling, establishing mechanistic relationships between larval traits, adaptive strategies and larval survival. The results will help to predict changes at the level of populations and adapt aquaculture facilities in response to future climatic conditions."