February 15, 2016 — Hot water is fine for fish chowder and lobster bisque, but not so much for many fish in the sea.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has unveiled a study of 82 species of fish, mollusks and crustaceans, ranking each on how they might fare under a regime of warming waters in the Northeast.
The authors, and there are quite a few, selected important commercial species, various forage fish of little economic import such as sand lances that are ecological heavyweights, and endangered species.
The amount of available data varies widely species by species, but the authors made their best assessments based on the estimated vulnerability of each animal to shifting climate. They weighed environmental factors that would be altered by climate change (water and air temperature, salinity, acidity, precipitation, the variance of those factors, sea level and ocean currents) vs. the species’ resilience (prey and habitat specificity, sensitivity to temperature, acidity, stock size, population growth rate, spawning cycle and mobility).
The ocean has been heating up, if not steadily.
“It depends on what period you’re looking over,” reflected lead author John Hare, director of NOAA’s Narragansett Laboratory. “I tend to look over a long period, since the 1880s, it’s up about two degrees Fahrenheit. We took all the information we know now and try to look forward to 2050.”
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