New York – To survive the warm -up of the oceans, clown fish adapt shrinking. Scientists observed that some of the orange stripe fish reduced their size during a heat wave off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The fish that were thinned were more likely to survive.
Heat waves are becoming more common and intense under water due to Climate change. Warmer water temperatures can bleach seaw anemones that clown fish call home, forcing them to adapt to stay alive.
The scientists monitored and measured 134 colorful clown fish in Kimbe’s bay during an intense heat wave in 2023 that is still whitening corals worldwide. They discovered that 101 clown fish decreased in length by one or more occasions due to heat stress.
“We were very surprised at the beginning when we saw that they were shrinking,” Said the author of Morgan Bennett-Smith study from Boston University. The findings were published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Although scientists still do not know how clown fish shrinks, an idea is that they could be reabsorbing their own bone matter. It is possible that the smallest height helps clown fish to save energy during a stressful burn, since smaller fish need less food.
Certain reproductive couples of clown fish also synchronized their shrink to increase their survival possibilities. The females adjusted their size to stay larger than their partners, keeping intact the social hierarchy dominated by females, the researchers said.
Other animals also decrease in size to combat heat. Sea iguanas become smaller during El Niño events that bring warm waters to the Galapagos. But this coping strategy had not yet been detected in the fish of coral reefs so far.
“This is another tool in the toolbox that the fish will use to deal with a changing world,” said Simon Thorold, an oceanic ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute that did not participate in the new study.
The tactic helps clown fish to fall short -term heat waves, but it is not yet clear how you will go to fish if they have to keep it in the coming years, Thorold said.
The researchers found that the shrink was temporary. The clown fish possessed the ability to “catch up” and grow again when their surroundings became less stressful, showing how living beings are staying flexible to keep up with a world in warming, said the author of the Melissa Versteeg study of the University of Newcastle.
“These natural systems are really under stress, but there is an incredible resilience,” Versteeg said.