Guest essay by Eric Worrall
James Cook University researchers have discovered if you heat fish above their natural tolerance range while mistreating them (simulating catch and release), a lot of them drop dead.
Rising temperatures may drive fishing-induced selection of low-performance phenotypes
Climate warming is likely to interact with other stressors to challenge the physiological capacities and survival of phenotypes within populations. This may be especially true for the billions of fishes per year that undergo vigorous exercise prior to escaping or being intentionally released from fishing gear. Using adult coral grouper (Plectropomus leopardus), an important fisheries species throughout the Indo-Pacific, we show that population-level survival following vigorous exercise is increasingly compromised as temperatures increase from current-day levels (100–67% survival at 24–30 °C) to those projected for the end of the century (42% survival at 33 °C). Intriguingly, we demonstrate that high-performance individuals take longer to recover to a resting metabolic state and subsequently have lower survival in warm water compared with conspecifics that exercise less vigorously. Moreover, we show that post-exercise mortality of high-performance phenotypes manifests after 3–13 d at the current summer maximum (30 °C), while mortality at 33 °C occurs within 1.8–14.9 h. We propose that wild populations in a warming climate may become skewed towards low-performance phenotypes with ramifications for predator-prey interactions and community dynamics. Our findings highlight the susceptibility of phenotypic diversity to fishing activities and demonstrate a mechanism that may contribute to fishing-induced evolution in the face of ongoing climate change.
Read more: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep40571
I have no doubt overheating already stressed fish causes higher mortality, and fish which “fight” harder (exhibit more stress) are more likely to die. But the inference that this will skew species towards low-performance phenotypes seems absurd.
Even assuming the world does warm as predicted, if tropical waters become too warm for some species, and for whatever reason those species have trouble adapting, they affected species will simply migrate to feeding grounds which are a few hundred miles further away from the equator, until they find their optimum temperature range.
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Sounds like another half cooked or cocked idea.. maybe half baked as well.
The warmer the waters get in the Sea of Cortez, the better the Dorado fishing gets.
And they are sure plenty lively when you hook one.
Never ever had one die on me, after being released. (Fly caught).
G
It does sound fishy. Kind of half baked.
who the f half cooks a fish. Stupid is the word of the day.
FISH LIVES MATTER!
And which half would you cook anyway?
(I prefer the middle half, personally ; )
i want to know who the f funds this crap .
“And which half would you cook anyway?”
You throw away the head, guts and spine, and keep/cook the “meaty” part (fillets & steaks).
Halibut might be something more like 80% to 20% though (you keep the 80%).
It is Sushi that you don’t half cook; but it is mostly already dead. Well the sea urchin roe is maybe still kicking.
g
Fish are every bit as stupid as frogs.
if you just warm the water slowly enough, the fish won’t jump out of it either, just like the frogs won’t.
And I’m sure that Captain Cook already knew that. But it seems he is more stupid now.
G
James Cook University seems to have more than its fair share of idiots
Who’s paying for JCU to torture FISH? Somebody tell PETA . . . /sarc
Maybe you should leave the sarc tag out let them deal with their ilk.
You, the taxpayer, are.
“You can never change just one thing.” Alarmists, though supposedly ecologists, often fail to bear that key ecological principal in mind when the CO2 level changes. They instinctively tend to think only of first-order effects, as long as they’re negative..
Secondly they assume that of all the possible adaptations, they know which one species will select for.
More often, they make the assumption that species won’t make even the most basic of survival measures, such as moving into a new area that has just been opened up by the warming.
By the same token, they assume that the population of low-lying coastal areas such as Bangladesh will just stand there and drown as the sea levels rise . . .
Well the Elephant and cow populations of Bangladesh will survive by going UPHILL instead of out on the tidal flats.
Well cows and elephants aren’t as stupid as humans.
g
Roger Knights:
“… when the CO2 level changes. They instinctively tend to think only of first-order effects, as long as they’re negative..”
I confess that I think of the negative first-order effect of a downward CO2 change below some threshold under which all fish, and all life will perish. The carbon cycle of life cannot complete without carbon dioxide. We know that level is somewhere between 0.035% and 0.0%.
Oops: “principle”
Breaking News….
Fish will evolve as fast as global warming
Film of fish fry at 11……..
I’ve also heard that hooks are bad for them, especially if someone uses those hooks to take them out of the water and carry them home.
The hooks have an unfair advantage since they tend to disguise themselves as tasty treats.
:I’ve also heard that hooks are bad for them, especially if someone uses those hooks to take them out of the water and carry them home.”
And sometimes they even die BEFORE they get cooked in that situation!
I wonder if warmists do not believe in evolution.
Something I have often noticed is that they say the believe in evolution. In other words, that evolution is something that brought about the present day. But they are adamant that further evolution mustn’t be allowed. I other words, they don’t want any more species to die of to make room for future species.
Is this more bad science or is it the new fake science news from the psych ops teams? Maybe Yale and James Mason Univ. can tell us.
Who dat James Mason ?? We were discussing the idiocy of Jimmy Cook.
g
So they go from water temperatures of 24–30 °C to those “projected for the end of the century [..]33 °C”. (And all while Trenberth is looking for ocean changes of ~0.1 °C or less in a vain attempt to find the missing heat?).
This “study” is actually quite typical of some of the worse papers you see in the biochemical/medical literature: They may get no measureable response to a drug/compound when applied in a reasonable realistic dose (we’re talking cells here, not people). So what do they do? They simply increase the dose way beyond physiologically reasonable or achievable levels until, by golly, they do get a response. It will probably be wholly irrelevant from a scientific standpoint, but they will have got some ‘result’ which they can then publish and pretend is meaningful.
Sounds like most cancer studies.
They give such high levels that 50% (LD50) of the subject mice die from the toxicity of the compound.
Then they look for cancer in the surviving mice.
It’s the application of Fudd’s First Law of Opposition:
“If you push something hard enough it will fall over!”
FJ Fudd, sometime in the early 1950’s
Mark,
Goodness me.
Yes.
+ lots.
Auto – bathing in the past.
Now 24C (72F) water is suitable for most aquatic life ….. and 30C (86F) water is part-time tolerable for most aquatic life …… but now 33C (91F) water is not long-time tolerable for most aquatic life simply because …. as water temperature rises, oxygen (O2) solubility decreases …… and the fishies start dying due to asphyxiation.
And ps, the resident high altitude and/or northern latitude (>37 degrees) aquatic life is quite happy with the “seasonal” temperature changes in their water environment that ranges from 33F in wintertime to 86F in summertime.
That is not completely right. Among the desert carp, there are some which can live in temperatures of 32 to 38 ° C, namely permanently, e.g. The Devil’s Pitcher, living in the Devil’s Hole, Ash Meadows, Nevada. There are many other types of desert carps that can tolerate even temperatures from 0 ° C to 40 ° C without any problems. Obviously it is just a matter of adoptions. Since the desert carp can withstand high salt concentrations in normal times as well as precipitation thinning salt concentrations, they could easily live in the sea. However, the question arises as to which amount of heat is necessary to permanently raise the upper limit of the surface temperatures of the currently warmest parts of the sea from about 30 degrees C to 33 degrees Celsius. Surely more than the predicted global warming of the next 200 years in the worst scenarios. Short-term surface heating during the highest heat level during the day can not be equated with the permanent heating of the first 20 meters of the ocean. In the warmest seasons, fish would not only have the possibility of geographic but also of vertical migration. Which, moreover, has always existed. In an aquarium, of course, this possibility does not exist.
“Obviously it is just a matter of adoptions.”
Adopt a desert carp now. Show that you care.
Did they really say –
[quote]billions of fishes per year[/quote]
– and still claim to be from a university?
Ooops – I obviously don’t know how to put quotes in properly!
Use angle-brackets instead of square ones.
Oh, I almost forgot:
” Even assuming the world does warm as predicted, if tropical waters become too warm for some species, and for whatever reason those species have trouble adapting, they affected species will simply migrate to feeding grounds which are a few hundred miles further away from the equator, until they find their optimum temperature range. ”
( just like humans , as we have always adapted to live in an environment to suit our capability to survive.)
My guess is they don’t know that tropical fish are found around New York
I think we need to allocate funding to study potential adaptive fish migration corridors
All of my fishing experience is in lakes and inland rivers. Those fish can’t really migrate. On the other hand, most of the fish I ever caught were probably the product of a fish hatchery. So, if the lakes do warm up, we have the infrastructure to change the fish. Could it really be that easy? Probably not.
“We propose that wild populations in a warming climate may become skewed towards low-performance phenotypes”
Just as likely:
Wild populations will become skewed towards individuals that are better adapted to the higher temperature.
exactly Mark….they are assuming their range and habitat will shrink
…and have no idea what circumtropical means
MarkW: Your quote inadvertently explains what has happened at James Cook University. Warming climate, whether real or fabricated, has indeed skewed the academic population towards low-performance professors.
“We propose that wild populations in a warming climate may become skewed towards low-performance phenotypes”
which then makes them high-performance phenotypes!
So higher temperatures save lives of “low-performance phenotypes”?
And why not just call them fish? Not enough syllables I guess.
“We propose that wild alarmists in a warming climate may become skewed towards low-performance phenotypes”
FIFY
did they deep fry any in batter?
Besides torturing fish, what did these nincompoops accomplish?
If this is true then how come there is such a huge industry catching them, keeping the Coral Trout alive and flying them to Restaurants in Australia and overseas?
Sorry, should have mentioned alternative facts.
When I catch Coral Trout in Hervey Bay, Qld, and if they are over the legal minimum then there is a 100% death rate as they enter my ice slurry. Delicious to eat!
This is not science, this is ‘science communication’ at work, i.e. science flavoured propaganda.
The cult of ‘science communication’ seemed like a good idea, explaining scientific research to the wider community, and there some excellent examples of such work but by the same token it enables the ‘sexing up’of work that is utterly banal at best and utter crap at worst. The schlok in question is at the latter end of the spectrum imo.
Unfortunately the dynamics of research funding, university ratings and other controlling or influencing factors is utterly distorting the decision making at universities for the worse in objective, scientific terms.
I wonder if any of them realize the paleoclimatic reconstructions show Earth having a “hothouse” climate many times over the last 600 million years? All current life is descended from species which survived these periods. See http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/PageMill_Images/image277.gif
I did find these data interesting. The connection to climate change was impertinent. So many other things could confound the question. What trout or muskie fisherman doesn’t know that catch and release is more dangerous for the fish survival when the water is warmer? I wish I could get paid to write goofy stuff. Thanks for keeping us abreast of academic nonsense.
Agree Steve. Releasing any trout any time is iffy, but far worse when warm. Other species (catfish, carp etc.) are tougher than nails. What bothered me most about the article was equating an angling battle with “exercise”. Fish can be totally exhausted after being hooked and fought for periods longer than a few minutes. Exertion of this magnitude would be rare in the wild, so equating fishing with predation is stupid. Most predation is virtually instantaneous in aquatic environments, and you are either lunch or free to swim another day. Some predatory species do “herd” their prey, but this is effective only in prey species that school in large numbers. More nonsense from arm chair academics.
Where in the world are they expecting water temperatures of 33°C (91°F)? Except in protected shallow bays and lagoons, the temperature drops very quickly when you go down a few meters. As a diver, I’d love to find a reef at even 29°C so I could ditch the wetsuit. So far, no such luck.
Assuming any of their suppositions are true, isn’t it likely that the same effect will happen with the predator species? And thus the net effect will be negligible?
Its probably also why we are hairless and we sweat.
Crikey!! Things just went to hell in Ozzy marine science without Steve Irwin.
http://assets.historyhole.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/05015146/624994-3eda0f94-a815-11e3-94c1-d923b8b77352_fajjlw.jpg
If you wind a boa constrictor big enough around you, you will probably find out if it is hungry or not.
Also swimming on top of a large sting ray may not be a good idea.
g
Was it the PDO that was discover through tracking Salmon migrations?
Ahttp://esseacourses.strategies.org/module.php?module_id=121
Crap, try this one 😉
http://esseacourses.strategies.org/module.php?module_id=121
Why don’t these so-called “researchers” ever consider that fish have survived admirably through many warm periods in the past. I suppose they have to keep the funding coming by doing studies supporting AGW, but no one is learning anything from these “studies”, science is not advancing. So much for thinking researchers would be above this, but i guess its difficult to advance a career without pandering.
The pursuit of science was in a better way when it was largely a hobby of the independently wealthy and a side project of military officers. The 20th century concept of scientist-as-career has made the discipline much more vulnerable to conflicts-of-interest, political advocacy, and economic pressures.
“We propose that wild populations in a warming climate may become skewed towards low-performance phenotypes with ramifications for predator-prey interactions and community dynamics”
The hotter it gets the lazier I get too!