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A commercial fisherman views his boat’s pollock catch in Newlyn, England, March 7, 2021.. <\/span>Hugh R Hastings\/Getty\/Inside Climate News<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This story was originally published b<\/em>y\u00a0Inside Climate News<\/a> and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0<\/em>Climate Desk<\/a>\u00a0collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n In the world\u2019s <\/span>waters, fish are making a quiet, biological retreat. The once simple rules of the ocean\u2014grow larger than potential predators\u2014are being rewritten as temperatures reach\u00a0record highs<\/a>. Desperate to survive, fish are hitting the fast-forward button on life in a biological shift that will soon impact what ends up on dinner tables globally.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are simply no real winners here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Fish are getting smaller and dying at higher rates as they adapt to warming waters, researchers warn in a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0released Thursday in the journal Science<\/em>. This evolutionary change will reduce global fish yields by one-fifth under current warming predictions, and up to 30 percent in high-emissions scenarios.\u00a0<\/p>\n This will trigger potentially irreversible evolutionary processes, shaking up entire ecosystems and food webs, with consequences for the billions of people who rely on seafood for protein\u2014a demand expected to increase.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I found frightening about this work was that it was difficult to identify winners and losers\u2014there are simply no real winners here,\u201d said Craig White, the study\u2019s co-author and an evolutionary physiologist at Monash University in Australia. \u201cThe combination of warming and evolution was always bad for fisheries.\u201d<\/p>\n Fish mortality rates have already been rising as waters warm. Although fisheries management often assumes fish are evolutionarily inert when it comes to overcoming such environmental changes, this is false. Instead, fish are maturing at a younger age and at a smaller size to improve their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce, according to the report.<\/p>\n Fishery yields were already expected to reduce by 14 percent when global temperatures reach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, when incorporating evolutionary impacts, the researchers\u2019 new model predicts this reduction worsens to 22 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n For the Alaska pollock\u2014a key species for human consumption in North America\u2014this would equate to a reduction of half a million metric tons harvested per year.<\/p>\n\n