Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that researchers have
modeled the impact of rising temperatures on more than 600
species between 2001 and 2050 and concluded that fish body size
may shrink in size by up to 24% because of global warming. The
researchers built a model to see how fish would react to
relatively small changes in temperatures at the bottom of the
oceans using data from one of the higher emissions scenarios
developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and found the resulting impacts on fish body size are
unexpectedly large. "Rising temperatures directly increase the
metabolic rate of the fish's body function," says lead author,
Dr. William Cheung, from the University of British Columbia.
"This leads to an increase in oxygen demand for normal body
activities. So the fish will run out of oxygen for growth at a
smaller body size." About half of this shrinkage is due to
change in distribution and abundance, the remainder to changes
in physiology and the tropical and intermedi