00:00Our warming oceans might be running out of fish faster than we ever thought.
00:06I'm Denis Loxie. This is Euronews Green.
00:09A landmark new study delivers a stark warning.
00:13For every tenth of a degree of ocean warming over a decade,
00:18fish populations fall by more than 7%.
00:21In a single year, biomass loss can hit nearly 20%.
00:26The numbers are staggering.
00:28Joining us now via video link is Dr. Shahar Chaykin,
00:33marine ecologist at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences
00:37and lead author of this study just published in Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
00:44Dr. Chaykin, welcome.
00:47Thank you very much for having me, Denis.
00:50Your data spans 33,000 fish populations and almost three decades.
00:55So could you tell us in plain English, please, what do you see and how bad is it?
01:03We know that warming has different facets.
01:06It could be long-term impacts by the gradual, you know, warming trend that we see in the oceans and
01:13in terrestrial environments.
01:14But at the same time, we have extreme events.
01:18We have those marine heat waves that hits the ocean and we see them in the news.
01:23We wanted to disentangle the effects of long-term warming from short-term warming events.
01:28And what do you see? How do heat waves, how does the warming, gradual warming of the ocean floor affect
01:34fish populations?
01:36Let's give an example, a fish that most of us are familiar with, the European Sprat, which is in almost
01:43every supermarket, I think.
01:46If we will look how a marine heat will impact this species in different locations, we'll see a different story.
01:53So if you are focusing in the Mediterranean Sea, where it is the warm edge of this species range, when
02:00a heat wave comes, the fish biomass will plummet.
02:03It will decline quite massively.
02:05But if we focus on another population positioned in Norway, for instance, when a marine heat wave will arrive, this
02:12population biomass is about to increase.
02:15So it means that marine heat waves create local winners and losers depending on where the population is.
02:22But what I would like to emphasize that these gains and loss are transient.
02:28They are temporal because in the long run, in the long term warming, what we found is that location doesn't
02:35matter anymore.
02:37Species, fish losing their biomass irrespective to the location they are found in the long term.
02:43So if, for instance, we have these gains in Norway, where perhaps it could look like a good idea to
02:53increase the quotes because we have increased biomass,
02:56it might actually be a bad idea in the long run because eventually biomass are declining everywhere.
03:03So the long term is a bad news for fish.
03:06Alarming findings.
03:07Thank you very much, Dr. Chaykin.
03:09And please stay with your news green.
03:11We'll keep watching our oceans, our continents, and all the science that matters for our planet.
03:19We'll keep watching our oceans.
03:19Thank you so much.
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