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CO2 Effecting fishes sense of smell

I’m pretty sure this is bad scientific research.

Mine can find food fine and shrimp are excellent at homing straight to the source within seconds of dropping food in the tank.

My tanks also have much more dissolved co2 in them than the ocean. At what depths is the study recording rises?


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It's not bad research, its a new replication and confirmation of results from a previous experiment conducted on sharks (new experiment conducted on Sea Bass). From what I've read the experiments were conducted in shallow tanks and the results showed that sense of smell was affected when CO₂ concentration in the water was increased to what the presumed amount will be in the year 2100 if current trends continue. The shark study showed a 50% decrease ability to detect squid ink placed in the opposite end of the tank with year 2100 CO₂ in the water (in the control tank the shark would sense the ink very quickly and home in on it and then remain there swimming around looking for that squid to munch on).

With regard to depths current research has focused on CO₂ levels in surface waters since that's where it currently is accumulating (surface water to 400m depth), taking into consideration advection (warm waters rising cold waters descending) is difficult because the timescales for this feedback is very long but it's projected this will happen (happening already with carbon capture sequestration schemes that store liquid CO₂ at great depths). Research focuses on the shallow waters as that's where life is most abundant and what happens there has a knock on effect for the rest of the oceans, the majority of that shallow sea life is dependant on Aragonite which the interaction between CO₂ and CaCO₃ is well understood scientifically.

Here's a good comprehensive PDF published by The Royal Society on Ocean acidification.

https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2005/9634.pdf

:)
 
This would be relevant if we released fish back into the wild. They might not be able to smell their food!

Also research done in Sea Bass can't really be generalised to fresh water. Maybe an expert could comment on this.
 
Yeah but testing at only 400m with the test subject being sea bass when the average ocean depth is nearly 4000m and doesn’t take into account the whole spectrum. Much like a tank, testing co2 dissolution at pretty much just the top 10% area of the water column would then leave open a whole host of reasons why this change might be occurring.

It could just be another cycle in the life of the planet where it will then swing back the other way in 500 years.




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