Climate change worse for marine life than forecast, study finds
A new approach prevents contradictory results from cancelling each other out.
A new analysis method of the effects of climate change on marine life has revealed the impact could be bigger than previously known.
The approach, conducted by researchers at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, prevents seemingly contradictory results from individual studies from cancelling each other out when collated.
Marine biologists often calculate the effects of climate change by considering data from fish and invertebrate species together to develop an understanding of overall worldwide impact.
However this does not account for differing responses to climate change. This can mean that, if an element of climate change has a positive effect on one species but negative on the other, the effects are cancelled out in the analysis.
For example, snails were found to be eating more due to climate change while sea urchins were eating less.
Researchers say that both of these changes are significant to the marine ecosystem, affecting all other animals in the habitat. Turf algae, which would normally be eaten by sea urchins, grows more while kelp, eaten by gastropods, decreases.
Katharina Alter, lead author of the study, developed a new approach which would not cancel out contradictory results, but instead consider all results to determine how climate change affected fitness in an ecosystem.
Prior to this new approach, marine biologists acknowledged three ways that ocean warming and acidic seawater impacted the ecosystem: reduced survival rate, increased metabolism, and weakened skeletons in invertebrates.
The new method of analysis has since raised additional biological responses to climate change. Researchers say that the physiology, reproduction, behaviour and physical development of marine wildlife were also negatively impacted.
The research team says that mitigating the increase of carbon dioxide levels could reduce the negative impact of climate change on the biological processes of marine wildlife.
Dr Alter said: "Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100 per cent of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25 per cent of all processes, respectively."
The full study can be found in the journal Nature Communications.
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