Hyderabad: Joining hands with Harvard University, the Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad has found how climate change impacts mercury accumulation in fish. It concluded that there are different levels of mercury found in various fish, and this was attributed to changes in sea temperature in recent years. The study has been published in the August issue of Nature.
The researchers chose the Gulf of Maine, a marginal sea in the Atlantic Ocean, for their study. They used three decades of data on the ecosystem and mercury concentrations and developed a model for mercury bioaccumulation.
Explaining the complexity of the problem, Dr Asif Qureshi, an IIT-H associate professor, who led the research from India, said, “There are three factors that affect mercury accumulation in fish — overfishing, which leads to dietary changes among marine animals, variations in the temperature of sea water, which leads to changes in fish metabolism that gears towards survival rather than growth, and changes in the amounts of mercury found in sea water as a result of pollution.”
