Abstract:
Our planet’s oceans, rivers, and lakes are facing severe threats, and among the most pressing current stressors are climate-change induced warming and deoxygenation. Biologists and ecologists have described the consequences of these developments for fish and other aquatic animals in detail, and identified global trends of climate-induced ecological impact, including habitat degradation, fish stock declines, and changing patterns in growth and reproduction. These observations call for urgent action. However, to act effectively and at the right scale, it is necessary to identify the general mechanisms that underlie observable trends.
This book presents a theoretical framework that allows for a mechanistic understanding of the impact of climate change warming and deoxygenation on the growth and reproduction of fish and other water-breathing animals. While all these animals exhibit a wide diversity of lifestyles and ecologies, we show that it is possible to identify general mechanisms that explain their central life-historical traits. We address these mechanisms within the theoretical framework of what we call the Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), which provides explanations for the growth and reproduction of water-breathing animals from the perspective of their capacity to take up oxygen. This theory builds on decades-long work on the biology of aquatic animals, and the book presents both the principles of this theory and the wide range of its applications in different sub-fields of the ecology, physiology, and reproductive biology of fishes and other water-breathers.
Presenting a theoretical framework that allows for a better understanding of this pressing topic is urgently needed. This book aims to address both scientists and policymakers who are interested in finding solutions to the current ecological crisis of the planet’s water bodies.
Contents
Chapter 1. Breathing water in a warming world
Chapter 2. What is growth? Pütter, von Bertalanffy and living systems
Chapter 3. Channeling the fire of life: fish gills and their geometry
Chapter 4. Temperature and its biochemical impact on water-breathing animals
Chapter 5. Temperature and its effects on water-breathing animals
Chapter 6. Objections to the theory and what to learn from them
Chapter 7. Why bony fishes mature and spawn when they do
Chapter 8. Growth and reproduction of Chondrichthyes
Chapter 9. Post-spawning growth acceleration
Chapter 10. Gigantism in fish
Chapter 11. Air-breathing fish: between two worlds
Chapter 12. Growth, respiration, and reproduction of water-breathing arthropods
Chapter 13. Molluscs and the GOLT
Chapter 14. Growth and reproduction in sponges, cnidarians and chaetognaths
Chapter 15. Limits of adaptation
Chapter 16. Inferring causality in metabolic scaling
Chapter 17. Epilog – Size and shape in a three-dimensional universe
Prof. Dr.
Daniel Pauly
Daniel Pauly studied fisheries science in Germany but spent much of his career in the tropics, notably in the Philippines. Since 1994, he is a Professor of Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, where he directs the Sea Around Us. Its research is devoted to studying, documenting and mitigating the impact of fisheries, and increasingly, the effects of global warming, on the world’s fish and marine ecosystems. The concepts, methods and software Daniel Pauly (co-)developed, are documented in over 1000 widely-cited publications, and have led to his receiving multiple scientific awards.
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Dr.
Johannes Müller
Johannes Müller is an environmental historian specializing in environmental change and its human perceptions as well as the history of knowledge and science. He is an assistant professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and a guest researcher at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. He currently leads and participates in several interdisciplinary research projects that focus on the history of biodiversity and environmental change in the Netherlands and its former colonies. Beyond his academic work, he has long experience in fish breeding and actively participates in various local biodiversity initiatives.
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