Whiting is among the demersal fish found in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean. Photo by Borut Furlan, taken from the website of our sister project FishBase.
Fish that live on or near the seafloor -known as demersal or groundfish- barely feel the impact of marine heatwaves, according to new research that highlights the need to keep seas from warming further.
Reference image of dead fish washed ashore during a golden algae toxic bloom. Photo by Michael Hooper, USGS.
Climate change-induced droughts and fish kills affect larger fish more severely than smaller individuals, according to new research.
In a paper published in Environmental Biology of Fishes, researchers from Leiden University, Sportvisserij Zuidwest Nederland and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia compared evidence from drought-induced fish kills in the Netherlands, fisheries management literature and multiple physiological studies. They confirmed that when water gets warmer and deoxygenated, larger and older individuals within a species tend to die in greater numbers than their smaller and younger counterparts.
Black and white snapper in the Red Sea, Egypt. Photo by Derek Keats, Wikimedia Commons
Warmer water than that to which a fish is used becomes an aggressor of sorts that impacts internal biochemical processes and forces the fish to stop growing at a smaller size than it would normally do in optimal habitat conditions, new research shows.
The Sea Around Us, together with the French Embassy in Canada, the University of Montpellier, FRB-CESAB: Centre de Synthèse et d’Analyse sur la Biodiversité and Rutgers University, is hosting the conference Fish biodiversity facing global change.
The event, which will take place on April 6, 2023, from 2-3 pm, at the University of British Columbia’s Michael Smith Labs Theatre, will present activities of the FISHGLOB consortium which has collected and combined a unique data set of scientific bottom trawl surveys conducted regularly during the last decades across the planet.
William Cheung. Photo courtesy of UBC Oceans.
William Cheung, Director of the Changing Ocean Research Unit at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and Associated Faculty at the Sea Around Us, is among the top 20 climate scientists in the world according to Reuters Hot List.
This accomplishment by Dr. Cheung is based on 176 publications that have received nearly 11,000 citations. His research has been conducted with 713 co-authors, notably Rashid Sumaila and Daniel Pauly, the researchers with whom he has collaborated the most.
Reuters’ ranking system also mentions that he has received
11 grants totaling $2.4 million.