During bouts of prolonged drought and little to no river flow, waterholes are a haven for freshwater fishes. However, as humans divert more water for their own use and as global temperatures rise, these small bodies of water are increasingly vulnerable to climbing temperatures and low oxygen levels. Fortunately, some fishes are able to change quickly to cope with high temperatures, and occasionally these changes also help them do better with low oxygen levels. But size matters when it comes to dealing with these stressors. Big fish are thought to deal with low oxygen better than small fish, and small fish are thought to deal better with high temperatures, but all are likely to be vulnerable when both stressful circumstances occur simultaneously. To investigate how body size influences a fish's ability to tolerate both high heat and low oxygen, Darren McPhee, with researchers from the University of Queensland and the Queensland Department of Regional Development, Australia, turned to massive Murray cod – which can grow to the size of a giant panda (over 100 kg) – to find out how they deal with the combined threat.
Working with fish ranging from 0.2 g to 3 kg, the team transferred the animals to water at temperatures mimicking a hot summer (28°C). After 4 weeks, all of the cod, regardless of size, increased the temperature at which they lose their balance (known as the upper thermal limit), indicating that the cod are able to deal with persistent high temperatures. But when the team tested the fish's abilities to remain upright at high temperatures as the water oxygen levels decreased, their ability to tolerate heat declined. Surprisingly, the fish's body sizes had an unusual impact on their ability to withstand high temperatures when their oxygen supply was restricted. As expected, when the fish had access to well-oxygenated water (100% and 50% oxygen saturation), the smaller animals coped better with high temperatures than the big fish. But this pattern flipped when the oxygen levels in the water were low (30% and 16% oxygen saturation), where the largest fish tolerated the high temperatures better than the smaller fish. Intriguingly, this didn't mean that the big fish were thermal tolerance champions. At the lowest oxygen level (16% oxygen saturation), the mid-sized fish coped best with the high temperatures.
The scientists also tested how short-term and persistent exposure to different temperatures affected the cod's ability to survive low oxygen in several different ways. In the short term (less than 24 h), fish exposed to high temperatures breathed faster and lost their balance at an oxygen level twice as high as what they would normally handle. But when exposed to a high heat for 4 weeks, the responses to low oxygen weren't quite as drastic. Again, the largest cod were the least bothered by decreasing oxygen – not changing their breathing frequency and taking longer to lose their balance (unlike the little fish).
Although Murray cod of all sizes demonstrated an amazing ability to cope with high temperatures in the lab, McPhee and colleagues also went into the wild to check the water quality of three Queensland waterholes that are much loved by the cod. The researchers found that the fish are living dangerously close to the edge – at the limit of the high temperatures and low oxygen levels that they can endure – especially during the summer. And, as the smallest cod are most vulnerable to the combined stress of high temperature and low oxygen, this slow-growing species is at genuine risk from catastrophic loss if their littlest ones succumb in the face of the deadly duo.
