Rates of marine warming onset affect reef fish mortality

While much of the work examining the ecological effects of marine warming events focuses on the magnitude and duration of elevated temperatures, a recent study from Amatzia Genin and colleagues investigates how the rate of onset of warming affects the mortality of reef fish in the Red Sea. These authors document fish mortality following two warming events with dramatic increases in temperature and report that piscivores and benthic grazers were disproportionately represented among the found carcasses. Many of these fish were infected with a bacterial pathogen following the warming event. This study points to the rate of warming increase as a critical parameter to be considered when assessing the ecological effects of marine warming events, including those for which the peak temperature is not anomalous.