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Fish size matters when ocean temperatures increases
Published: 12 July 2016
In Aqua Introductory Research Essay 2016:3, Climate change impacts on fish communities – how individual responses to climate change are mediated by size-structured interactions, Max Lindmark reviews how size-dependent individual-level processes are accelerated by increasing ocean temperatures, and how that can translate into altered size-structures and dynamics of fish communities.
This essay addresses a key knowledge gap in current climate change research, namely how direct physiological impacts from increasing temperatures interplay with indirect effects that emerge from altered interactions between- and within-species. Such interactions affect food availability, and therefore together with temperature shape important ecological features such as growth and body size. In addition, general temperature- and size-scaling theories are reviewed and their strengths and weaknesses are discussed, from an ecological perspective.
Read the essay Climate change impacts on fish communities – how individual responses to climate change are mediated by size-structured interactions, by Max Lindmark.
Read more essays in the series Aqua Introductory Research Essay published by SLU Aqua