Warming Atlantic Sets Stage for Invasive Species Outbreak

Warming water temperatures due to climate change could expand the range of many native species of tropical fish, including the invasive and poisonous lionfish, according to a study of 40 species along rocky and artificial reefs off North Carolina by researchers from NOAA and the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

The findings, reported for the first time, were published in the September issue of Marine Ecology Progress Series.

“The results will allow us to better understand how the fish communities might shift under different climate change scenarios and provide the type of environmental data to inform future decisions relating to the management and siting of protected areas,” said Paula Whitfield, a research ecologist at NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) and lead author of the study.

The North Carolina reefs lie within the temperate-tropical transition zone, where historically, both temperate and tropical species live, at their respective range limits. However, water temperatures in the zone are becoming more tropical, making it an important place to detect climate changes and its impacts.

The researchers first made these discoveries during an ecological study of the marine communities on the North Carolina reefs. Findings from this earlier study showed similar shifts of climate change induced shifts in algal populations.

Researchers combined year-round bottom water temperature data with 2006-2010 fish community surveys in water depths from 15 to 150 feet off the coast of North Carolina.

The study revealed that the fish community was primarily tropical in the deeper areas surveyed, from 122 to 150 feet, with a winter mean temperature of 21 °C (69.8 °F). However, many of these native tropical fishes, usually abundant in shallow, somewhat cooler reefs, tended to remain in the deeper, warmer water, suggesting that temperature is a main factor in controlling their distribution.

Similarly, the distribution of the venomous Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans), a species new to the Atlantic since 2000, was restricted to water depths deeper than 87 feet where the average water temperature was higher than 15.2°C (approximately 59.4 °F).

As the more shallow waters warm, lionfish may expand their range, since they seem to be attracted to areas with a warmer minimum temperature. Although lionfish only arrived in North Carolina in 2000 they were the most common species observed in water depths from 122 to 150 feet in this study.

Since their first sighting off the Florida east coast, in the late 1980s, lionfish have spread throughout the western North Atlantic including the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.

They are considered a major threat to Atlantic reefs by reducing reef fish recruitment and biomass, and have been implicated in cascading impacts such as decreased coral cover on coral reefs. To date, cold winter bottom temperatures are the only factor found to control their distribution on a large scale.