A year ago, Adelino Canário and Pedro Guerreiro took the same route to join an expedition lasting almost two months, during which they developed several experiments to study the adaptation of fish to climate change. This time, Bruno Louro, also a researcher at this Center, joins Pedro Guerreiro for the trip to the Polish Henrik Arctowski Base on King George Island.
The two CCMAR researchers leave this week and will continue the work developed under the Fishwarm project, integrated in the Portuguese Polar Program (PROPOLAR).
This CCMAR project aims to study the adaptations of Antarctic fish to climate changes. These evolved for more than 25 million years in a stable environment of very low temperatures and practically constant salinity, developing their own physiological and behavioral adaptations, such as low metabolism, antifreeze proteins, lack of hemoglobin, reduced stress response and a renal system without a filtering device (glomerulus).
The rise in global temperature can have an important impact on the environment in which these fish live, either because of its direct effect on fish, or because of the appearance of aquatic areas with low salinity caused by the melting of sea ice and by the flow of glaciers. Specifically, on the Antarctic Peninsula, the study area, surface waters have warmed by nearly 3 degrees over the past 50 years.
How do Antarctic fish that inhabit the coastal zones manage to deal with these two changes is the question that this project tries to answer.
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