July 10, 2019 — Bright orange clownfish, of Finding Nemo fame, face a slew of problems in the wild, from overharvesting for home aquaria, to bleaching of their coral and anemone homes by climate change-induced warming waters. And now there’s a third prong on this deadly trident: light pollution.
Published today in Biology Letters, a new study reveals that clownfish, which are dependent on coral reefs, can’t raise any young when exposed to artificial light.
The human-made light that is spewed over Earth endangers animals across ecosystems. Nighttime lights alter birds’ nocturnal migrations. Plants bloom earlier.Sea turtles avoid nesting on brightly-lit beaches. Songbirds start warbling earlier.
“But we don’t think about underwater marine systems being potentially impacted,” says Emily Fobert, a marine ecologist at Flinders University in Australia and lead author of the study.
“I wasn’t expecting the result [in the paper] to be that nothing hatched,” says Thomas Davies, a conservation ecologist from Bangor University in Wales. “It’s quite worrying…a really big result that speaks to how light pollution can have a really big impact on marine species.”