Australian Parvancorina minchami life restoration at MUSE - Science Museum in Trento, Italy

Ancient seafloor creature grew like modern marine invertebrates – study

Australian Parvancorina minchami life restoration at MUSE - Science Museum in Trento, Italy

Australian Parvancorina minchami life restoration at MUSE – Science Museum in Trento, Italy. Image by Matteo De Stefano, Wikimedia Commons.

The growth and lifespan of Parvancorina minchami, small anchor-shaped animals that lived on the seafloor about 550 million years ago, resemble that of current marine invertebrates like golden shrimp and Baltic clam.

New research by a team at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Harvard University and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia shows that P. minchami’s longevity was about four years, that they could reach close to 20 millimetres in length, and that their pace of growth was similar to that of small recent invertebrates.

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Measuring Baltic herring.

Taking seriously the explanations on shrinking fish in a warming world

Measuring Baltic herring.

Measuring Baltic herring. Photo by Aleksey Kusnetsov, Wikimedia Commons.

As climate change continues to warm and deoxygenate ocean water, the size of fish, aquatic molluscs and crustaceans is showing a concerning reduction pattern. This pattern manifests a life history in which the animals exposed to rising temperatures grow fast when they are young but mature at smaller sizes than before and their final body sizes are also smaller than they used to be.

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Marine and Freshwater Miscellanea

Sea Around Us produces new ‘miscellanea’ report

Marine and Freshwater Miscellanea

The Sea Around Us PI, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and communications officer, Valentina Ruiz-Leotaud, have produced a new Fisheries Centre Research Report titled Marine and Freshwater Miscellanea V.

As its four predecessors, this document presents a diverse range of topics that offer substantial contributions to the field of fisheries science and which, if not published as an FCRR, might have remained stored away in individual researchers’ desks or computers.

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Cover of the Journal of Fish Biology. June 2024.

Paper on gigantism makes cover of Journal of Fish Biology

Cover of the Journal of Fish Biology. June 2024.

Cover of the Journal of Fish Biology. June 2024.

A recent paper authored by the Sea Around Us’ PI, Dr. Daniel Pauly, research assistant, Elaine Chu, and Dr. Johannes Müller from Leiden University, has made the cover of the June print issue of the Journal of Fish Biology, where it was introduced by a brief essay in the ‘Between the Covers’ section. The image that illustrates it is that of a large mythical sea creature known as an Aspidochelone, which appeared in a French bestiary around 1270 A.D.

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