The key to adaptation limits of ocean dwellers
The simpler a marine life form is built, the better it is suited for survival during climate change. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) discovered this in a new meta-study, which has been published in the research journal Global Change Biology. For the first time biologists studied the relationship between the complexity of life forms and the limits of their adaptation to a warmer climate. While unicellular bacteria and archaea are able to live even in hot, oxygen-deficient water, marine inhabitants with a more complex structure, such as animals and plants, reach their growth limits at the latest at a water temperature of 41 degrees Celsius. This temperature threshold seems to represent an insurmountable obstacle for their highly developed metabolic systems.