Climate Change

Coral reefs have been seeking new pastures, as rising temperatures heat up their natural habitats.

Over the last four decades, coral reefs have been progressively shifting their homes from equatorial waters to more temperate regions.

The reason? Climate change.

“Climate change seems to be redistributing coral reefs, the same way it is shifting many other marine species,” said Nichole Price, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and lead author of the paper on the topic.

A recent study by France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues indicates that the anemonefish does not have the genetic ability to adapt swiftly enough to climate change.

The findings of the study were published in the November 27 issue of the Ecology Letters journal.

The research was conducted in the lagoons of Kimbe Bay, covering more than a decade. This area is a biodiversity hotspot in Papua New Guinea.

According to a new study, climate change is giving rise to changes in the diets of fishes in Ontario lakes, thereby altering the food webs there.

Researchers from the University of Guelph have discovered that the fish in Ontario lakes have been forced to forage in deeper waters due to the warmer average temperatures in the past decade. As a result, they consume prey species that are different from their normal diet, and this has led to a change in the flow of energy and nutrients in the lake.

Antioxidant capacity is a critical component of stress tolerance because in a range of organisms, including corals, stressors such as high water temperature, poor water quality and even pathogen infection, produce an increase in damaging, highly reactive oxygen molecules (free radicals) inside the tissues.

The ability to tolerate environmental stress varies between individuals, so the team associated with the Australian Institute of Marine Science set out to find the most stress-tolerant of the common reef-building coral Acropora millepora.

With up to 10m tides, the Kimberley region in north Western Australia has the largest tropical tides in the world, creating naturally extreme and highly dynamic coastal habitats that corals from more typical reefs could not survive.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute were thus surprised to find that corals from the region are just as sensitive to heat stress and bleaching as their counterparts from less extreme environments elsewhere.

Corals depend on symbiotic algae to survive and build coral reefs. Increased ocean temperatures due to climate change can cause these symbiotic algae to be expelled from the coral, an event known as bleaching, which often leads to death.

Scientists from University of Miami placed corals in tanks and subjected them to increased water temperatures to gain insights into how they may react to global warming by replicating ocean conditions that would lead to both mild and severe coral bleaching.

According to a new study from the University of British Columbia, the worst-case scenario—in which ocean temperatures rise by as much as 3 degrees Celsius by 2100—showed fish could move as far as 16 miles per decade away from the equator.

The study also predict, based on projections from multiple models, that egg and hatchling survival will drop by half in the next 100 years as a result of global climate change.

When leatherback turtle hatchlings dig out of their nests buried in the sandy Playa Grande beach in northwest Costa Rica, they enter a world filled with dangers. This critically endangered species faces threats that include egg poaching and human fishing practices.