Uh, wait, no that’s “nuisance fish will escape better” (odd, we know of lots of cases where gambusia are deliberately distributed to eat mosquito larvae rather than using chemical larvacides so presumably they are good when they are green – but not when they are warm enough to get away from Australian bass, apparently).
Global warming could advantage one pesky marine species while disadvantaging its predator, a new study suggests.
The study, of the eastern mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) and its predator, the Australian bass (Macquaria novemaculeata), is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“Mosquitofish are very aggressive – they eat lots of tadpoles and eat or damage a lot smaller fish,” says biologist Professor Frank Seebacher, of the University of Sydney.
“Once mosquitofish come in, the biodiversity decreases quite sharply. They are much more of a problem than canetoads.”
Seebacher and colleagues wanted to investigate how increasing water temperatures could affect the relationship between mosquitofish and its predator.
“Species respond really differently to the same changes in climate,” says Seebacher. “This is the first study to that looks at the thermal effects on interactions [between species].”
