Warming
driving fish toward poles at alarming speed: study
Contrary
to previous thinking, marine species are
heading toward the poles as the climate warms—and
doing so more than 10 times faster than land creatures, a
report says.
5
August, 2013
“The
leading edge or front-line of marine species
distributions is moving toward the poles at
an average of 72 km [45 miles] per decade,” compared
to 6 km for land species, said Elvira Poloczanska,
the lead author.
“This
is occurring even though sea surface temperatures
are warming three times slower than land temperatures,”
added Poloczanska, a research scientist
with Australia’s national science agency,
the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organisation.
Oceans
cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface, but our
knowledge of its responses to climate change is far
less than for land habitats. The new report, published
in the journal Nature Climate Change, is designed
to help correct that deficiency.
The
vast blue deep is “a totally different system
with its own unique set of complexities and
subtleties,” said Camille Parmesan of the
University of Texas at Austin, one of the
researchers. Yet the impact is similar: “an
overwhelming response of species shifting
where and when they live in an attempt to track a shifting
climate.”
The
scientists, from 17 institutions worldwide,
gathered data from seven countries to create
a database of 1,735 changes in marine life from research
literature. The changes were documented with
an average length of 40 years of observation.
“This
is the first comprehensive documentation
of what is happening in our marine systems in
relation to climate change,” Parmesan said.
“Far from being a buffer and displaying more
minor changes, what we’re seeing is a far stronger
response from the oceans.”
The
largest shifts were found for plankton and bony fish, which
are most fish. Researchers also found that the timing
of spring events in the oceans had advanced by more than four
days, nearly twice the figure for land
So are the Capitalists!
ReplyDelete