Many fish species are finding it harder to survive because of warmer ocean temperatures, overfishing, and increasing plastic pollution. In a troubling new study, French researchers found the number of fish species at risk of extinction is five times higher than previously thought.
What's happening?
Researchers from the MARBEC Unit (the Marine Biodiversity, Exploitation, and Conservation Unit) in France predicted, based on their models, that nearly 13% of marine teleost fish species — which include salmon, tuna, catfish, and cod — are at risk of dying out, a fivefold increase from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's previous estimate of 2.5%.
"Our analysis of 13,195 marine fish species reveals that the extinction risk is significantly higher than the IUCN's initial estimates," Nicolas Loiseau, one of the study's lead researchers, said in a news release in the Public Library of Science, via Phys.org.
While the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species tracks over 150,000 species to assess their extinction risk status and inform conservation policies (as the release reported), many species have slipped under the radar.
According to the report summary, 38% of marine fish species (around 4,992 species) are deemed Data-Deficient, meaning there isn't enough information to determine their extinction risk.
To close this data gap, Loiseau, fellow lead researcher Nicolas Mouquet, and colleagues used the power of machine learning and AI to give the overlooked species a conservation status. Of the 4,992 species, 1,671 were categorized as Predicted Threatened, up from the prior estimate of 334.
Why is the increased extinction risk among fish concerning?
According to The Nature Conservancy, over 3 billion people depend on healthy oceans for their primary food source and livelihood. Fisheries and ocean-based tourism provide jobs for many coastal communities, so protecting marine ecosystems is crucial for people to feed their families and earn a living.
Healthy ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive and sustain the food chain. When part of the complex food web collapses, it has a ripple effect on other species.
For example, warming ocean temperatures already affect sardines' migratory patterns, leaving whales, dolphins, and other large marine creatures without a critical food source. Sardines are also an important food source for fish that humans eat, such as tuna and salmon, per The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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What's being done to protect fish?
The latest research didn't detail the exact species at risk of extinction, but it did pinpoint hot spots of Predicted Threatened species.
Researchers listed the South China Sea, the Philippine and Celebes Seas, and the Australian and North American west coasts as locations that would benefit from greater conservation efforts. They also recommended a higher conservation priority in the Pacific Islands and Southern Hemisphere's polar and subpolar regions.
With the help of advanced technologies such as AI, tracking the conservation status of fish could be much easier and cheaper than relying on direct evaluations — though the researchers noted the importance of both.
"Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables the reliable assessment of extinction risks for species that have not yet been evaluated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature," Loiseau said.
"We propose to incorporate recent advancements in forecasting species extinction risks into a new synthetic index called 'predicted IUCN status.' This index can serve as a valuable complement to the current 'measured IUCN status.'"
Meanwhile, we can help protect fish and the oceans by opting for plant-based meals more often and using green technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles, which maximize clean energy and can help cool the planet.
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