Ocean Acidification Making It Harder for Fish to Breathe

As dawn breaks over an estuary meandering past the forests and homes of Maryland’s unincorporated Beverly Beach, silver baitfish surface to gulp at oxygen-rich waters.  New research shows how climate change is making the seemingly-peaceful ritual, which plays out in shallow waters the world over, more desperate and deadly.

With carbon dioxide pollution dissolving into water bodies, causing them to acidify, laboratory experiments showed silversides in the sprawling Chesapeake Bay will find it harder to breathe in low-oxygen conditions.  The findings have sweeping global implications.

“These fish are superabundant — everything else eats them,” said Seth Miller, an ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Institute who led the research, published Tuesday in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.  “What happens to them really affects what happens to the rest of the food web.”

Silversides captured near Beverly Beach in Anne Arundel County and elsewhere in Chesapeake Bay died in Miller’s research tanks in low-oxygen conditions as pH declined, even before oxygen concentrations reached low levels that would normally kill them.

As the tank waters in Miller’s experiments became more acidic, the silversides also surfaced more quickly to gulp at oxygen-rich surface waters.  In the wild, that would make the small fish easier prey for birds and other fish.

As carbon dioxide dissolves into oceans and makes them more acidic, less oxygen is dissolving into warming waters.  The research showed that these two chemical consequences of climate change could conspire to affect the surface-breathing behavior of some fish.  “It’s the combination of lowering the pH and the dissolved oxygen,” Miller said.

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