Fish News: Some Like it Hot

It's not every day that you hear good news coming out of applied climate research, but last week, researchers at James Cook University  discovered that some damselfish have an incredible ability to adapt to temperatures outside of their historical tolerance limits.  Sound fishy?  Of course, the devil is in the details, as they say.  When researchers first exposed the fish to water temperatures one to three degrees above their norm, they quickly became lethargic.  While this is a typical response (for humans as well as fish I would argue), researchers decided to take their work a step further and study the possibility for intergenerational adaptation, a concept with important climate change implications.

Once they determined that the fish slowed down in warmer waters, the researchers did not give up on the possibility of adaptation.  So, they took male and female fish and bred them in warmer waters for numerous generations and then carried out the same metabolic tests.  Not only did they find that the fish had regained their vigor, but they had done so within only one generation.  Surprisingly, the children of the original cohort had already adjusted to the warmer waters in no time at all!  

Of course, its not all good news.  Like all science, this work comes with its caveats.  Researchers admit that the fish that can tolerate warmer temperatures are in fact smaller than their parents.  And even this adaptive ability has only been seen in one species thus far.  The biggest implications of this finding is that adaptation could potentially keep up with climate change in some similar coral reef species.  Reef ecosystems are one of the most vulnerable to climate change from rising ocean acidity.  However, perhaps these findings provide some hope that the system and its strong linkages will be able to buffer against the most dramatic of changes.  Keep your eyes peeled for similar studies from the tropical research institutions around the world!