Overfishing, hunting and intensive agriculture and forestry can sometimes contribute to plants and animals becoming endangered.
Overfishing, hunting and intensive agriculture and forestry can sometimes contribute to plants and animals becoming endangered. New research from Lund University in Sweden and University of Toronto can now show why this leads to entire populations becoming smaller in size, as well as reproducing earlier. The study is published in the journal PNAS.
Researchers from Lund and Toronto are behind the study conducted on five different species of damselflies. They have studied how different environmental factors affect when and at what size the damselflies begin to reproduce. In the study, the researchers also shed light on how overfishing off the coast of Newfoundland has had direct consequences for the reproduction size and age of cod, which is similar to what they have found in damselflies.
”Overfishing has resulted in the cod now reproducing earlier and at a smaller size, something it has been forced to do to survive. If it had not evolved in this way, it might have completely disappeared from the waters off southeastern Canada”, says Viktor Nilsson-Örtman, a researcher at Lund University.
Read more at Lund University
Photo Credit: C1ri via Pixabay
