This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Research led by scientists at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette challenges a long-held assumption about the effects of climate change on marine life: Warmer oceans won't simply make animals smaller. The study was led by Isaac Trindade-Santos, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher in the UL Lafayette laboratory of senior author Dr.
Trindade-Santos is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Researchers analyzed more than 23,000 species of marine mollusks—the group that includes clams, oysters, snails, squid, octopuses and chitons—and found that body size is projected to decline in most ocean regions by 2100. But those changes are far from uniform.
Some groups could shrink dramatically, while others are projected to grow larger. The study, "Nonuniform resizing of marine life under climate change," is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "For years, the idea that warming oceans would simply shrink marine life has been treated almost as a rule of thumb," said McClain, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences in the Ray P.
Authement College of Sciences. "Our results show that's too simple a story. Across an entire phylum and at a global scale, we found that some of the most basic animals in the ocean are going to respond to climate change in strikingly different ways—and a few will actually get bigger.
That complexity matters enormously for how we think about the future of ocean ecosystems." Researchers combined more than 2.79 million species occurrence records with body-size measurements to examine how temperature, oxygen and ocean productivity affect five major groups of mollusks. They then projected those relationships through 2100 across 10 major ocean basins under high- and low-emissions climate scenarios. The study draws on centuries of accumulated natural history data, including species records and body-size information assembled in open biodiversity databases.
Trindade-Santos helped McClain develop the Marine Organismal Body Sizes database used in the research. Under the high-emissions scenario, researchers project significant decreases in mean body size in roughly two-thirds of the groups and ocean regions they examined. In some cases, average body length could decline by as much as 16% by 2100.
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