The warming of the Earth’s oceans due to climate change is affecting where the world’s fishes live, eat and spawn — and often in ways that can negatively impact their populations.
The warming of the Earth’s oceans due to climate change is affecting where the world’s fishes live, eat and spawn — and often in ways that can negatively impact their populations. That’s according to a new paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The researchers write that populations that experience rapid-range shift decline noticeably, up to 50 per cent over a decade. The populations affected most are those living on the northern poleward edges of their species’ range.
“There is a conventional wisdom among many climate-change biologists that species that shift their ranges quickly by moving northward should provide a mechanism to sustain healthy populations — that shifting species should be climate-change winners. Our results show the exact opposite,” says paper co-author Jean-Philippe Lessard, a professor in the Department of Biology.
“Species that are shifting their range quickly experience little change in their population size in their core range. But some of them experience a major collapse in their populations at the northern edges.
Read more at Concordia University
Photo Credit: Diego Delso via Wikimedia Commons
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