Thursday March 14, 2024
PhysOrg —
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 published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The researchers write that populations that experience rapid-range shift decline noticeably, up to 50 percent 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.