Breathing Water in a Warming World: Principles and Applications of the Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory

Warming waters and deoxygenation reshape fish growth and reproduction by limiting oxygen uptake capacity across shared physiological constraints.

Climate change and deoxygenation are among the most urgent threats to our planet’s oceans, rivers, and lakes, and the animals that inhabit them. The impact of warming waters and declining oxygen levels includes shifts in individual growth and reproduction, as well as changes in population dynamics and species distribution. These developments demand action, but to act effectively it is important to understand the general mechanisms that drive these trends.

This book presents a theoretical framework for explaining how warming waters and deoxygenation affect the growth and reproduction of fish and other water-breathing animals. Despite their diversity, these organisms share fundamental life-history traits shaped by common physiological mechanisms and constraints. We address these mechanisms within the Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), which explains growth and reproduction in terms of oxygen uptake capacity. Building on decades of research, this book outlines the principles of GOLT and explores its wide-ranging applications in ecology, physiology, and reproductive biology.

By presenting this unifying framework, the book provides a foundation for more effective responses to the current crisis in our planet's waters.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Breathing water in a warming world
Chapter 2. What is growth? Pütter, von Bertalanffy and living systems
Chapter 3. Channeling the fire of life: fish gills and their geometry
Chapter 4. Temperature and its biochemical impact on water-breathing animals
Chapter 5. Temperature and its effects on water-breathing animals
Chapter 6. Objections to the theory and what to learn from them
Chapter 7. Why bony fishes mature and spawn when they do
Chapter 8. Growth and reproduction of Chondrichthyes
Chapter 9. Post-spawning growth acceleration
Chapter 10. Gigantism in fish
Chapter 11. Air-breathing fish: between two worlds
Chapter 12. Growth, respiration, and reproduction of water-breathing arthropods
Chapter 13. Molluscs and the GOLT
Chapter 14. Growth and reproduction in sponges, cnidarians and chaetognaths
Chapter 15. Limits of adaptation
Chapter 16. Inferring causality in metabolic scaling
Chapter 17. Epilog – Size and shape in a three-dimensional universe

Daniel Pauly studied fisheries science in Germany but spent much of his career in the tropics, notably in the Philippines. Since 1994, he is a Professor of Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, where he directs the Sea Around Us. Its research is devoted to studying, documenting and mitigating the impact of fisheries, and increasingly, the effects of global warming, on the world’s fish and marine ecosystems. The concepts, methods and software Daniel Pauly (co-)developed, are documented in over 1000 widely-cited publications, and have led to his receiving multiple scientific awards.

Johannes Müller (PhD, University of Freiburg, 1990) is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. He is the founding director of the Johanna Mestorf Academy, Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre “Scales of Transformation: Human-environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies” and of the Excellence Cluster “ROOTS – Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies”.

He conducts research on Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, including the challenge of interlinking natural, social, life sciences, and the humanities within an anthropological approach of archaeology. Intensive fieldwork was and is carried out in international teams, e.g., on Tripolye mega-sites in Eastern Europa, the Late Neolithic tell site of Okolište in Bosnia-Hercegovina, different Neolithic domestic and burial sites in Northern Germany, and Early Bronze Age sites in Greater Poland. Ethnoarchaeological fieldwork has been conducted, e.g., in India. Within the Kiel Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes”, now the Young Academy of ROOTS, and the Scandinavian Graduate School “Dialogues of the Past”, Johannes Müller promotes international PhD projects.