Monday 12 November 2012

Warming Temperatures Cause Aquatic Animals to Shrink the Most


ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2012) — Warmer temperatures cause greater reduction in the adult sizes of aquatic animals than in land-dwellers in a new study by scientists from Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Liverpool.
The research published Nov 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that the body size of marine and freshwater species are affected disproportionately by warmer temperatures. This could have implications for aquatic food webs and the production of food by aquaculture.
The researchers compared the extent to which the adult size of 169 terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species responded to different non-harmful temperatures, in the largest study of its kind.
Summarising the results, co-author Dr Andrew Hirst from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said:
"Aquatic animals shrink 10 times more than land-dwellers in species the size of large insects or small fish. While animals in water decrease in size by 5 percent for every degree Celsius of warming, similarly sized species on land shrink, on average, by just half a percent."

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