Global warming benefits the small in aquatic ecosystems
- 4 August 2009
- journal article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 106 (31), 12788-12793
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0902080106
Abstract
Understanding the ecological impacts of climate change is a crucial challenge of the twenty-first century. There is a clear lack of general rules regarding the impacts of global warming on biota. Here, we present a metaanalysis of the effect of climate change on body size of ectothermic aquatic organisms (bacteria, phyto- and zooplankton, and fish) from the community to the individual level. Using long-term surveys, experimental data and published results, we show a significant increase in the proportion of small-sized species and young age classes and a decrease in size-at-age. These results are in accordance with the ecological rules dealing with the temperature-size relationships (i.e., Bergmann's rule, James' rule and Temperature-Size Rule). Our study provides evidence that reduced body size is the third universal ecological response to global warming in aquatic systems besides the shift of species ranges toward higher altitudes and latitudes and the seasonal shifts in life cycle events.Keywords
This publication has 33 references indexed in Scilit:
- Potential Effects of Striped Bass Predation on Juvenile Fish in the Hudson RiverTransactions of the American Fisheries Society, 2008
- Impacts des pressions climatiques et non climatiques sur les communautés piscicoles de grands fleuves françaisHydroécologie Appliquée, 2008
- Daily ocean monitoring since the 1860s shows record warming of northern European seasGlobal Change Biology, 2007
- Climate change and the optimal arrival of migratory birdsProceedings. Biological sciences, 2006
- An indoor mesocosm system to study the effect of climate change on the late winter and spring succession of Baltic Sea phyto- and zooplanktonOecologia, 2006
- Timing and abundance as key mechanisms affecting trophic interactions in variable environmentsEcology Letters, 2005
- TOWARD A METABOLIC THEORY OF ECOLOGYEcology, 2004
- Ecological responses to recent climate changeNature, 2002
- A modified Mann-Kendall trend test for autocorrelated dataJournal of Hydrology, 1998
- Observations on the age, growth, reproduction and food of the dace, Leuciscus leuciscus (L.), in two rivers in southern EnglandJournal of Fish Biology, 1974