Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels May Threaten the World's Fish Stocks with Intoxication

Rising carbon dioxide levels may actually intoxicate fish. Scientists have found that carbon dioxide concentrations in seawater could reach levels high enough to make fish "intoxicated" and disoriented many decades earlier than previously thought.

Ocean hypercapnia is predicted to occur when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations exceed 650 parts per million. In this latest study, the researchers utilized a global database of seawater carbon dioxide concentrations collected during the past 30 years as part of a variety of oceanographic programs.

"We then devised a numerical method to work out the natural monthly peaks and troughs in carbon dioxide concentrations during the year across the surface of the world's oceans, based on these observations," said Tristan Sasse, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This allowed us to predict for the first time that these natural oscillations will be amplified by up to tenfold in some regions of the ocean by the end of the century, if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise."

So what does this mean for the fish? By 2100, creatures in up to half of the world's surface oceans may be impacted by hypercapnia, which is when the CO2 emissions in seawater are high enough to cause fish to be intoxicated.

Currently, the scientists want to predict the onset of hypercapnia. However, this is difficult due to a lack of global ocean measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations. However, the researchers are hopeful that they can spur further research to learn a bit more about these levels across the world.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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