Climate Change Effects on Fishes

Fishes comprise the most diverse group of aquatic vertebrates and are found across the world’s aquatic biomes and ecosystems — in freshwater, estuaries, as well as in the ocean. With this diversity also comes an extensive array of life histories, behaviors, physiologies, and adaptations. In addition to long-term direct human perturbations on fish populations and communities, such as overfishing, habitat destruction, and aquatic pollution, indirect human stressors such as various climate change stressors are now increasingly having an impact on many fish species as well. It is predicted that climate change stressors such as warming, acidification, and hypoxia will alter fish biodiversity, change their geographic distributions, alter their fitness and performance, and create novel community structures. Due to their rich diversity, it is difficult to predict how each fish species will respond to the interplay of various climate stressors. However, fish species can often be classified into guilds, functional groups, life history strategies, etc., based on various traits. As such, some generalizable patterns may emerge on how specific (taxonomic/functional) groups of fish species might respond to current and future climate change. This bibliography covers key studies on climate change effects on (predominantly marine) fishes, through the lens of fish ecology. It assesses the current published literature in terms of various research fields in fish ecology, scaling up from cellular, individual, and population levels to higher levels of biological organization such as communities, ecosystems, and biogeographies. Such a broad bibliography might provide for a better appreciation of the complexity of studying climate change impacts on fishes, as their ecology is intertwined with that of many other species, habitats, and environmental drivers. The ecological responses of fishes at multiple levels of biological organization mediate their fitness, performance, and persistence, and generalizable insights are needed for their biodiversity conservation, and to evaluate their importance for various ecosystem services, including fisheries.