Abstract
There is increasing empirical evidence of the shifting range distributions of tropical reef fishes as a response to persistent climatic warming. However, the link between the observed disparity of closely related species’ occurrence in temperate waters and their trait-based responses to winter thermal conditions is unclear. This study focuses on congeneric tropical reef fishes with similar dispersal potential (pelagic larval duration) but with varying occurrence in Kochi, southwestern Japan. The studied species include the abundantly occurring, overwintering, and reproductively established species in Kochi (adapted) and the less abundant species with no recorded overwintering and adult populations (non-adapted). This study assessed the responses of congeneric adapted and non-adapted species from two genera of Pomacentridae (Pomacentrus and Dascyllus) and one from Chaetodontidae (Chaetodon) to the winter seawater thermal range in Kochi by subjecting them to the decreasing temperature from 25 to 15 °C (1 °C d−1) in the laboratory. Both the adapted and non-adapted species demonstrated swimming and feeding reductions when temperatures approached 18 °C. However, stress-related behaviors were observed at 17 °C in the non-adapted species compared with 16 °C in their adapted congeners. The non-adapted species also exhibited relatively lower growth rates and higher mortality rates of > 50% during the 3-d exposure to 15 °C, indicating that the minimum winter temperature in Kochi is often lethal to these species. Thus, the present study highlights the species-specific cold thermal tolerance of tropical reef fishes to winter conditions at the leading edge as a useful predictor of a given specie’s range-shift capacity.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Mindanao State University at Naawan (MSUN) for supporting the logistics during the field-based fish surveys in Mindanao and to Eugene Moleño, Darwin Baslot, and Daryl Baslot of MSUN for their kind assistance. This study was implemented under the auspices of the research collaboration between MSUN and Kochi University. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review.
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This study was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI 15K07529) through the Climate Change Impacts Project.
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JCL and YN designed the study. JCL and YN performed the laboratory experiment, and JCL analyzed the data. JCL, YN, and WHU conducted the field survey. JCL wrote the paper with the help of YN and WHU. All the authors have approved the contents of this paper and have agreed to its submission to Marine Biology.
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Although the Animal Experiment Committee of the Kochi University ruled that no ethical clearance or approval of research ethics was required for this study because experimental work was conducted with an unregulated fish species, we followed all applicable institutional and/or national guidelines for the care and use of animals in this study. A minimum number of fish were used to test the hypothesis. After the experiment, fish were kept in home aquariums where they demonstrated normal conditions (e.g., unstressed body color and actively swimming).
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Leriorato, J.C., Nakamura, Y. & Uy, W.H. Cold thermal tolerance as a range-shift predictive trait: an essential link in the disparity of occurrence of tropical reef fishes in temperate waters. Mar Biol 168, 93 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-021-03875-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-021-03875-2