Do you ever notice that you start to notice patterns in news stories? I am kind of following a developing research news story suggesting that species might get smaller as a result of climate change.
The next eon could be one of smaller species — after the Anthropocene Age runs most species into the ground.
Smaller animals won’t need as much food. So it won’t matter to them that their neighborhood is emptying of dinner as other species are driven to extinction.
Some examples are:
Scientists have already found that Sheep and humans are getting smaller because of climate change. And now, we hear that fish are getting smaller. All of these changes have happened in areas with the most increase in local temperatures over the last 30 years.
“It’s huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne.
The researchers found that on average, fish got smaller as temperatures rose in their environments over time.
For communities of fish in large French rivers, for example, the team observed “a decrease on average of something like more than 60 percent of the mean size at the community scale,” according to the study team’s leader.
“It’s something which seems to happen everywhere, which supports global warming’s role.”
Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study published Monday has found.
Daufresne said it is possible that global warming could have “a significant impact on organisms in general.”
Earlier research has already established that fish have shifted their geographic ranges and their migratory and breeding patters in response to rising water temperatures. It has also been established that warmer regions tend to be inhabited by smaller fish.
Daufresne and his colleagues examined long-term surveys of fish populations in European rivers, streams and the Baltic and North Seas.
They found the individual species lost an average of 50 percent of their body mass over the past 20 to 30 years while the average size of the overall fishing stock had shrunk by 60 percent.
“It was an effect that we observed in a number of organisms and in a number of very different environments – on fish, on plankton, on bacteria, in fresh water, in salt water and we observed a global shrinking of size for all the organisms in all the environments,” Daufresne said in a telephone interview.
While commercial and recreational fishing did impact some of the fisheries studied, it “cannot be considered as the unique trigger” for the changes in size, the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found.
Smaller fish provide less sustenance for predators – including humans – which could have significant implications for the food chain and ecosystem.
Image from flikr user !!sahrizvi!!
Via Terra Daily
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(: We can always be vegitarians!
Here’s another idea to consider – swordfish for the commercial market are much smaller than even ten years ago. Heat? I don’t think so – it’s called “humans eating the world” and in my opinion is caused by overfishing species that take longer to mature than we allow. We used to harvest swordfish that were of breeding age and older, therefore bigger. As demand grew, the fish size “shrank” due to excessive fishing and catching more and more immature fish. Thankfully demand is down some, due to efforts to reduce demand and the number of restaurants that serve swordfish. As it disappears from the menues, I think we will start to see bigger fish. Same thing happens with other species as well…