According to a recent Rutgers study, warming of the oceans due to climate change could result in less profitable fish species to catch in the future.
As temperatures rise, predator-prey interactions will prohibit species from keeping up with the conditions where they may thrive.
The latest study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, paints a conflicting picture of ocean health.
As the climate warms, major species and commercially important fisheries will not only shift out of their historical boundaries, but they will also be less plentiful in their new geographic areas.
A cod fisherman in the Atlantic, for example, might still locate fish 200 years from now, but in much smaller numbers.
“From a fisheries standpoint, this means that while the species we fish today will be present tomorrow, they will not be in the same abundance.” Because population growth rates are low in this situation, overfishing becomes easier,” said study co-author Malin Pinsky, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources. “It’ll be like putting marine biodiversity in a blender if warming is combined with food-web dynamics.”
The direct effects of climate change on individual species were the focus of previous research of shifting habitat ranges.
While these “one-at-a-time” species estimates provide information about the composition of ocean communities in a warming world, they generally ignore the impact of food-web interactions on the rate of change.
Millions of species are moving poleward as the climate rises, causing a major restructuring of life on Earth.
However, a critical element of life — animals and other organisms must feed — has been largely overlooked in our understanding of these processes.
The researchers investigated how the basic desire for nutrition impacts the mobility of species to bridge this knowledge gap.
The researchers created a “spatially explicit food-web model” that took into account factors like metabolism, body size, and ideal temperature ranges.
Their model found that species’ capacity to respond swiftly to warming temperatures is hampered by dynamic trophic interactions when climate change is taken into account.
They also discovered that larger top predators stay in historical environments longer than smaller prey, possibly due to the emergence of new food sources in their pre-warming ranges.
“These processes will be global, not just in one region,” Pinsky added. “This does not bode well for marine life, and this is not a generally recognized effect.”
To read our blog on “A new digital twin of the Earth will support the fight against climate change,” click here.
