KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
Just a few hundred kilometres west of Abu Dhabi Island lies an impressive cluster of islands and shoals beaming with marine life. Bu Tinah Island, as the archipelago is known, is home to as many as 16 species of coral reef, extensive seagrass beds, at least 600 dugongs and a variety of wild birds and fish.
However, what makes this island truly impressive is that it manages to exist in the Arabian Gulf, one of the warmest and most saline bodies of water in the world. Corals, and many other species of marine life, are known to survive in water that is between 23°C and 28°C, and yet in the Arabian Gulf, where water temperatures can reach 35°C, they appear to be thriving.
As climate change threatens to increase water temperatures around the world, the baffling secrets of this ecosystem have become the focus of scientists around the world with local researchers leading the way to unlock the flora and faunas’ secrets of resilience.
“The high salinity and temperature that many places fear that will happen to them, the corals that are here in the Arabian Gulf have adapted to already,” Anne Valentina Bourbon, the head of the education programme at the National Aquarium in Abu Dhabi, told Aletihad.
“Scientists are working on trying to understand what is the genetic making of these corals and fish that makes them so resilient, and how this could be transferred across the planet to help them survive extreme temperatures…. It’s sort of like the world’s laboratory.”
When Aletihad toured the aquarium last week, Valentina Bourbon said the segment which had been designed as a recreation of Bu Tinah Island’s ecosystem was frequented by researchers conducting controlled studies of species in hope of making a breakthrough.
On Monday, researchers from NYU Abu Dhabi announced that they had achieved just that: Discovering adaptations in both the metabolism and swimming abilities of fish that help them survive in the harshness of the Arabian Gulf.
The report, which was released as a collaborative effort between John Burt from NYU Abu Abu Dhabi’s The Mubadala Arabian Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences and Jacob Johansen from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology found that species of fish in the gulf could be even more resilient to climate change than many initially thought.
The study found that despite the prevailing theory that fish size should reduce with rising heat, due to reduced metabolic oxygen-supply, many fish in the Arabian Gulf actually demonstrated “a capacity to maintain efficient oxygen supply to fuel performance even at elevated temperatures”.
Current scientific models predict that by 2050, coral reef fish could shrink by 14%-39% in size due to increasing temperatures, but the paper challenges this view, believing there to be other factors at play.
With the shrinking of fish set to devastate both coral ecosystems and the global fishing industry, the research has the potential to give clues as to how the worst of climate catastrophe could be averted.
“The hottest coral reefs in the world are an ideal natural laboratory to explore the future impact of rising water temperatures on fishes. Our findings indicate that some fish species are more resilient to climate change than previously understood and help explain why smaller individuals are evolutionarily favoured at high temperatures.
This has significant implications for our understanding of the future of marine biodiversity in a continuously warming world,” said Associate Professor of Biology, John Burt, in a statement.