A new book focused on the principles and applications of the Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT) is scheduled for publication in March 2026.
Co-authored by the Sea Around Us PI, Dr. Daniel Pauly, and Dr. Johannes Müller, assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, Breathing Water in a Warming World presents a theoretical framework for explaining how warming waters and deoxygenation affect the growth and reproduction of fish and other water-breathing animals.
Common carp. Photo by Aquatika Karlovac, FishBase
A widely debated topic in biology and fisheries sciences is the role of oxygen in the growth of fishes and other water-breathing animals. According to new research, developmental changes in individual fish and experimental errors are the causes of inconsistencies that have erroneously been linked to the Gill Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), developed to explain the influence of oxygen uptake on fish growth.
Daniel Pauly at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, September 2024. Photo by Valentina Ruiz-Leotaud.
In the heat of summer in central Greece, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki hosted the 22nd FishBase and SeaLifeBase Symposium.
Titled “Fishes in Changing Ecosystems,” the two-day event started on September 2, 2024, with a full day dedicated to some of the overarching themes the Sea Around Us team is doing research on.
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.
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.