December 16, 2014 — Climate change seems to be pushing several species of fish and crustaceans northward along the east and west coasts of North America which could have serious effects on birds, marine mammals and those who depend on fishing for food and income.
“As temperatures have warmed in the waters off our coasts, animals with a low tolerance for that warming have just picked up and shifted,” says Malin Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers who is leading a team researching these shifts. “I hesitate to say ‘moved,’ mainly because we don’t yet know whether fish are actually swimming, or whether they’re simply reproducing more slowly in their old ranges and faster in their new ranges.”
Pinsky says lobsters that were once abundant off Long Island have moved to cooler waters of Maine while summer flounder and black sea bass, once common to the waters off Cape Hatteras, have moved north and are now more abundant off the coast of New Jersey.
During the past 18 months, Pinsky, an assistant professor of ecology and evolution in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, has published two papers — Climatic Change in October 2012 and Science in September 2013 — documenting this trend and exploring its implications. He and his team have found that the shift northward is happening at different rates among the species not because of their biological differences but due to the rate and direction of climate change in their waters.
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