PRIMARY RESEARCH PAPER Integrated early warning systems in marine bivalves reveal detrimental alterations of coastal habitats Massimiliano Scalici . Monica Colamartino . Federica Spani . Lorenzo Traversetti . Tiziana Persichini . Maria Maisano . Salvatore Fasulo . Marco Colasanti Received: 30 July 2019 / Revised: 14 April 2020 / Accepted: 22 April 2020 / Published online: 30 April 2020 Ó Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Abstract Several biological levels are considered as signals of environmental perturbations so that inte- grative biological responses have been proposed in environmental monitoring activities. We evaluated the use of markers in Mytilus galloprovincialis at two different levels (protein nitration and S-nitrosylation, and geometric morphometrics) to investigate the sea coastal environmental status. We studied adductor muscle, digestive gland and valves of mussels col- lected from 3 sampling sites (2 disturbed ? 1 control) in eastern Tyrrhenian Sea, and 2 (1 ? 1) in western Ionian Sea. Molecular and morphometric markers showed significant variations in relation to environ- mental conditions, but the most interesting result was evidenced by the analysis of covariation between both protein post-translational modifications and geometric morphometric descriptors. The main interesting find- ing regards the relationship between protein nitration values (an irreversible molecular marker) of both adductor muscle and digestive gland, and geometric morphometric descriptors (that are Procrustes’ dis- tances) of valve shapes. Molecular and morphometric markers revealed useful warning systems in detecting environmental changes, even if causes and mecha- nisms altering both cellular metabolism and shape morphology are still unclear. Our findings suggested Handling editor: Manuel Lopes Lima Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04275-1) con- tains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Scalici (&) Á M. Colamartino Á F. Spani Á L. Traversetti Á T. Persichini Á M. Colasanti Department of Sciences, University Roma Tre, Viale Guglielmo Marconi 446, 00146 Rome, Italy e-mail: massimiliano.scalici@uniroma3.it M. Colamartino e-mail: monica.colamartino@uniroma3.it F. Spani e-mail: federica.spani@uniroma3.it L. Traversetti e-mail: lorenzotraversetti@yahoo.it T. Persichini e-mail: tiziana.persichini@uniroma3.it M. Colasanti e-mail: marco.colasanti@uniroma3.it M. Maisano Á S. Fasulo Department of Chemical, Biological, Pharmaceutical and Environmental Sciences, University of Messina, Viale Ferdinando Stagno d’Alcontres 31, 98166 Messina, Italy e-mail: mmaisano@unime.it S. Fasulo e-mail: salvatore.fasulo@unime.it 123 Hydrobiologia (2020) 847:2573–2585 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04275-1