Of course they’re not “our” fish, but in the sense that human activity is irrevocably effecting aquatic ecosystems, saying “our” somehow seems right. Think of it like this: their survival on planet Earth depends on our actions, in particular minimizing and repairing the damage we’ve done to our wet friends via overfishing, polluting, and changing the global climate. So, “our.” If you break it, you buy it. Though in this case, humans have the moral imperative to fix it and return it. It might do us some good, too, given the results of a new, comprehensive study of global warming’s effects on world fisheries.“Fisheries are already providing fewer fish and making less money than they could if we curbed overfishing," says Rashid Sumaila, principal investigator of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the study (published in Nature Climate Change), in a UBC press release. "We could be earning interest, but instead we're fishing away the capital. Climate change is likely to cause more losses unless we choose to act."The anticipated results are fairly expected. Warmer water will chase fish to cooler, deeper water. Which is terrible for the fishing industry. Well, good, if you’re a fisherperson in a cold Northern climate fishing for warm water fish, but bad for most everyone else. An example cited is the ‘97 – ’98 El Nino. The change in water temperature cost Peruvian fisheries $26 million on lost revenue. That’s simply a snapshot of what will happen around the globe with long-term widespread sea surface temperature increases.There won’t just be less fish either. “Changes in temperature and ocean chemistry directly affect the physiology, growth, reproduction and distribution of these organisms,” says William Cheung, a biologist at the UBC, in the same release. “Fish in warmer waters will probably have a smaller body size, be smaller at first maturity, with higher mortality rates and be caught in different areas. These are important factors when we think of how climate change will impact fisheries.” In other words, the world’s fish will be crappier.The answer, of course, is the same as it always is: intensive intervention from the planet’s various governing bodies. Which, if responses to global warming so far are any indication, will go just swimmingly.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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