Temperature and massive fish deaths in southern South America.?

GONZALEZ NAYA M. JIMENA; RAMIREZ LUCIANA; GÓMEZ SERGIO E.; MENNI ROBERTO C.

Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales "Bernardino Rivadavia"

Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2011 p. 131 - 134

1514-5158

 Based on a compilation of data on massive fish deaths occurred in southern South America during the Twentieth Century, we assessed the importance of climatic variables on these phenomena. We found a strong relationship (R2 =0.68) with between these massive fish deaths and the mean monthly air temperature. Along the annual temperature range there is a central range (14.6°C to 20.0°C), where the probabilities that a fish community suffers massive deaths is very low. Its central point (17.3°C) is very close to the mean annual value (17.2°C) of air temperature variation. We considered this agreement as corroboration at community level of  Pianka?s  theory  on  physiological  optima.  This  relationship  allows  to  monitoring  the  influence  of  climate changes, because the environmental variation and the zones of mortality and no mortality will change with predicted changes of the mean monthly values of air temperature.