Doom: ‘Climate Change’ Could Maybe Possibly End The Grouper’s Moonlit Orgies

Bet you never thought you’d read those three words in a sentence, eh?

Climate Change May Bring the Nassau Grouper’s Moonlit Orgies to an End

Just before a full moon ascends over the Caribbean, Nassau groupers congregate by the thousands in winter and early spring to lace the water column with eggs and sperm. One such bacchanalia in the Bahamas in 1971 included an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 of these four-foot-long, brown-and-white-striped fish getting their freak on. Bull sharks visit this spawning frenzy too, in the hopes of an easy meal, as do gigantic whale sharks who can’t resist all that fresh caviar. (snip)

Trouble is, after decades of overfishing, just 10,000 mature Nassau groupers remain, and their spawning spectacles can’t occur just anywhere. The fish, which can weigh as much as a bulldog, breed only in a narrow band of temperatures, from about 74.2 to 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit (24 to 27 degrees Celsius). According to a study published by Erisman and lead author Rebecca Asch in the journal Diversity and Distributions, climate change could cook the Nassau grouper’s orgies out of existence.

Through computer modeling, Erisman and Asch dialed up all the Caribbean habitat currently conducive to grouper sexy times and then projected how much would remain over the course of the next century if current carbon pollution rates continue as expected. The findings were bleak: Some 82 percent of the Nassau grouper spawning habitat found between 1981 and 2000 could disappear by 2081. Most of this lost habitat would be in the waters surrounding Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Central America’s Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System.

Did you catch the flip from “overfishing” to AGW doom? In fact, much of the rest of the article, and others if you look them up, discuss the issue of overfishing. It’s like they threw ‘climate change in there for the hell of it.