2023-09-04 00:00:00
Although in recent decades the increasingly common and intense marine heat waves have been associated with negative ecological effectsa recent study prepared by an international team of scientists claims that They do not have negative impacts on the biomass of pieces nor, neither, in the quantity and composition of its population.
recently published in the Nature magazine, the study had the participation of researchers from several European countries and the United States and Canada. who analyzed the effects of 248 seabed heat waves between 1993 and 2019 in marine fish, analyzing 82,322 sets (samples) of scientific studies in the long term of ecosystems continental shelf in North America and Europe spanning from the subtropics to the Arctic.
The scientists detected a 22% loss of fish biomass in the Gulf of Alaska after the heat wave that shook that region between 2014 and 2016, while they verified a biomass gain of 70% in the northeast of the United States after the heat wave that took place in 2012.
Besides, the researchers did not find a significant relationship between the cumulative intensity of marine heat waves and the evolution of the biomass of groundfish, nor they observed a rapid decline of cold water fishnot even one abundance of warm-water fish as a result of these intense heat waves.
“We know that fish communities have responded to long-term warming of the oceans by moving poleward, which can change fish biomass and composition at a specific location,” Al explainedexa Fredston, an assistant professor in the Department of Ocean Sciences at the University of California, United States.
“In the highly variable context of ocean ecosystems, marine heat waves have not driven biomass changes or community turnover in the fish communities that support many of the world’s largest and most productive fisheries”, concluded the main author of the investigation.
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