The climate crisis and warming seas are forcing many fish species to move from the tropics to the poles, which is changing the composition of catches in subtropical, temperate and subpolar regions.

Speaking to APE-MPE, the director of the Ichthyology Laboratory of AUTH, professor of the Department of Biology, Athanasios Tsikleras, made this observation on the occasion of the 22nd Annual FishBase Symposium, entitled “Fishes in changing ecosystems”, which is organized by the Ichthyology Laboratory and starts today at the Center for Dissemination of Research Results of AUTH.

According to Mr. Tsikleras, a classic example of the movement of fish, due to overheating, are the species coming from the Levantine, such as the harefish, the lionfish and the German, which increase and spread with the rise in temperature.

In the southern Aegean and the Dodecanese they are already used to seeing these species – according to the professor – which perhaps could have been prevented if we had ensured a higher biomass of endemic fish, so the entry of alien species would have been more difficult.

“If we had ensured a healthier ecosystem in the Aegean by fighting overfishing, we would have fewer alien species and fewer problems related to ecosystem imbalance,” says Mr. Tsikleras.

“Consider also”, he continues, “that 10 years ago, the anchovy reached the North Sea and the Baltic again, where they had not seen it for 50 years, because the climatic conditions favored its spread in those places.”

The opening speech of the Symposium will be given by Daniel Pauly, professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada and honorary doctorate of the AUTH Biology Department. Daniel Pauly has written more than 1000 scientific publications and about 20 books dealing with the biology of marine organisms and the management of their populations, while he was one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about the ecosystem effects of overfishing worldwide.