Suffering in the heat: the rise in marine heatwaves is harming ocean species

Recent marine heatwaves have devastated crucial coastal habitats, including kelp forests, seagrass meadows and coral reefs.
Dan Smale, Author provided

Dan Smale, Marine Biological Association and Thomas Wernberg, University of Western Australia

In the midst of a raging heatwave, most people think of the ocean as a nice place to cool down. But heatwaves can strike in the ocean as well as on land. And when they do, marine organisms of all kinds – plankton, seaweed, corals, snails, fish, birds and mammals – also feel the wrath of soaring temperatures.

Our new research, published today in Nature Climate Change, makes abundantly clear the destructive force of marine heatwaves. We compared the effects on ecosystems of eight marine heatwaves from around the world, including four El Niño events (1982-83, 1986-87, 1991-92, 1997-98), three extreme heat events in the Mediterranean Sea (1999, 2003, 2006) and one in Western Australia in 2011. We found that these events can significantly damage the health of corals, kelps and seagrasses.

This is concerning, because these species form the foundation of many ecosystems, from the tropics to polar waters. Thousands of other species – not to mention a wealth of human activities – depend on them.

We identified southeastern Australia, southeast Asia, northwestern Africa, Europe and eastern Canada as the places where marine species are most at risk of extreme heat in the future.

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Read more:
Marine heatwaves are getting hotter, lasting longer and doing more damage

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Marine heatwaves are defined as periods of five days or more during which ocean temperatures are unusually high, compared with the long-term average for any given place. Just like their counterparts on land, marine heatwaves have been getting more frequent, hotter and longer in recent decades. Globally, there were 54% more heatwave days per year between 1987 and 2016 than in 1925–54.

Although the heatwaves we studied varied widely in their maximum intensity and duration, we found that all of them had negative impacts on a broad range of different types of marine species.

Marine heatwaves in tropical regions have caused widespread coral bleaching.

Humans also depend on these species, either directly or indirectly, because they underpin a wealth of ecological goods and services. For example, many marine ecosystems support commercial and recreational fisheries, contribute to carbon storage and nutrient cycling, offer venues for tourism and recreation, or are culturally or scientifically significant.

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Marine heatwaves have had negative impacts on virtually all these “ecosystem services”. For example, seagrass meadows in the Mediterranean Sea, which store significant amounts of carbon, are harmed by extreme temperatures recorded during marine heatwaves. In the summers of both 2003 and 2006, marine heatwaves led to widespread seagrass deaths.

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The marine heatwaves off the west coast of Australia in 2011 and northeast America in 2012 led to dramatic changes in the regionally important abalone and lobster fisheries, respectively. Several marine heatwaves associated with El Niño events caused widespread coral bleaching with consequences for biodiversity, fisheries, coastal erosion and tourism.

Mass die-offs of finfish and shellfish have been recorded during marine heatwaves, with major consequences for regional fishing industries.

All evidence suggests that marine heatwaves are linked to human mediated climate change and will continue to intensify with ongoing global warming. The impacts can only be minimised by combining rapid, meaningful reductions in greenhouse emissions with a more adaptable and pragmatic approach to the management of marine ecosystems.

Dan Smale, Research Fellow in Marine Ecology, Marine Biological Association and Thomas Wernberg, Associate professor, University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Suffering for science: why I have insects sting me to create a pain index

Justin Schmidt, University of Arizona

Over the past 40 years (but in reality since I was five years old), I’ve been fascinated with insects and their ability to sting and cause pain. In graduate school, I became interested in why they sting and why stings from such tiny animals hurt so much.

To answer these questions, we first needed a way to measure pain – so, I invented the insect pain scale. The scale is based on a thousand or so personal stings from over 80 insect groups, plus ratings by various colleagues.

Insects sting to improve their lives and increase their opportunities. The stings provide protection, thereby opening doors to more food resources, expanded territories, and social life within colonies. By studying stinging insects, we gain insight into our own lives and the societies we live in.

Why sting?

To say that insects sting “because they can” isn’t all that helpful. The real question is why insects evolved a stinger in the first place. Obviously, it had some value, otherwise it would have never evolved – or, if initially present, it would have been lost through natural selection.

Stingers have two major uses: to get food and to avoid becoming food for some other animal. Examples of the stinger used for sustenance include parasitic wasps that sting and paralyse caterpillars that become food for the wasp young, and bulldog ants that sting difficult prey insects to subdue them.

More importantly, the stinger is a major breakthrough in defence against large predators. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an average-sized insect being attacked by a predator a million times larger than you. What chance would you have?

Honeybees face this problem with honey-loving bears. Biting, scratching or kicking won’t work. But a stinger with painful venom often does.

In this sense, the stinging insect has found a way to overcome its small size. The stinger is an “insect gun” of sorts – it neutralises the size difference between assailant and victim.

The insect sting pain index

This is where the insect sting pain index comes in. Unless we have numbers to compare and analyse, sting observations are just anecdotes and stories. With numbers, we can compare the effectiveness of one stinging insect’s painful defence against others and test hypotheses.

One hypothesis is that painful stings provide a way for small insects to defend themselves and their young against large mammalian, bird, reptile or amphibian predators. The greater the pain, the better the defence.

Greater defence allows insects to form groups and become complex societies as we see in ants and social wasps and bees. The greater the pain, the larger the society can become. And larger societies have advantages not enjoyed by solitary individuals or smaller societies.

Human and insect societies

Human sociality allows individuals to specialise and do a particular task better than most others. Examples of human specialists include plumbers, chefs, doctors, farmers, teachers, lawyers, soldiers, rugby players and even politicians (a profession sometimes viewed dubiously, but required for society to function).

Social insect societies also have specialists. They forage for food, tend to young, defend the colony, reproduce and even serve as undertakers removing the dead. Another advantage of societies is the ability to recruit others to exploit a large food source, or for the common defence, or to have additional helpers for difficult tasks.

Sociality also has a more subtle advantage: it reduces conflict between individuals within a species. Individuals not living in social groups tend to fight when they come in contact. But to live in a group, conflict must be reduced.

In many social animals, conflict is reduced by establishing a pecking order. Often, if the dominant individual in the pecking order is removed, violent battles erupt.

In human societies, conflict is also reduced via pecking order, but more importantly through laws, police to enforce laws, and gossip and societal teachings to instil co-operative behaviour. In insect societies, conflict is reduced by establishing pecking orders and pheromones, chemical odours that identify individuals and their place in society.

Why do we love pain?

The insect sting pain index also provides a window into human psychology and emotion. Put simply: humans are fascinated by stinging insects. We delight in telling stories of being stung, harrowing near-misses, or even our fear of stinging insects.

Why? Because we have a genetically innate fear of animals that attack us, be they leopards, bears, snakes, spiders or stinging insects.

People lacking such fear stand a greater chance of being eaten or dying of envenomation and not passing on their genetic lineage than those who are more fearful.

Stinging insects cause us fear because they produce pain. And pain is our body’s way of telling us that bodily damage is occurring, has occurred, or is about to occur. Damage is bad and harms our lives and ability to reproduce.

In other words, our emotional fear and infatuation with painful stinging insects enhances our long-term survival. Yet, we have little emotional fear of cigarettes or sugary, fatty foods, both of which kill many more people than painfully stinging insects. Fear of those killers is not in our genes.

The insect sting pain index is more than just fun (which it is too). It provides a window into understanding ourselves, how we evolved to where we are, and what we might expect in the future.

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This article is the final part of our series Deadly Australia. You can see the whole series here.

Justin Schmidt, Entomologist, Southwest Biological Institute, University of Arizona

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.