September 30, 2024 — Many fish species are finding it harder to survive because of warmer ocean temperatures, overfishing, and increasing plastic pollution. In a troubling new study, French researchers found the number of fish species at risk of extinction is five times higher than previously thought.
What’s happening?
Researchers from the MARBEC Unit (the Marine Biodiversity, Exploitation, and Conservation Unit) in France predicted, based on their models, that nearly 13% of marine teleost fish species — which include salmon, tuna, catfish, and cod — are at risk of dying out, a fivefold increase from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s previous estimate of 2.5%.
“Our analysis of 13,195 marine fish species reveals that the extinction risk is significantly higher than the IUCN’s initial estimates,” Nicolas Loiseau, one of the study’s lead researchers, said in a news release in the Public Library of Science, via Phys.org.
While the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species tracks over 150,000 species to assess their extinction risk status and inform conservation policies (as the release reported), many species have slipped under the radar.