A Tasmanian woman investigating how the climate affects fish is one of eight researchers from around the world to receive a prestigious $150,000 grant.
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Dr Asta Audzijonyte, a scientist at the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and Centre for Marine Socioecology, has been awarded a fellowship in marine conversation through The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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She said the end goal of her research would be to help ensure coastal fisheries and marine ecosystems were managed in sustainable ways.
"We have accumulated quite a lot of data already about how many fishes there are and how big they are all around the oceans," Dr Audzijonyte said.
"The project aims to turn that data into knowledge. Data is one thing but we have to be able to understand what the data says."
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Dr Audzijonyte said the grant funding would allow her to build further on smaller studies previously carried out.
"The money will be used to do all sorts of complicated statistical analysis...to understand how the size of fishes are changing through space and time," she advised.
"We previously did a small pilot study around Australia to see if fish were actually getting smaller or not with temperature."
The pilot study allowed Dr Audzijonyte to test idea that fish would get smaller because of climate change, she said.
"We found that if a fish is smaller where it's warmer...lets say in the area closer to the equator, it's also likely to get smaller in time when the same area warms.
"If a fish is bigger... it's also likely to get bigger in time when the area warms."
Dr Audzijonyte said her new research would seek to effectively turn the small pilot study into a much broader global analysis.
"We know that changing temperatures are changing the sizes of fish, yet we do not know yet how that will affect marine ecology and fisheries.
"My project aims to help understand that and hopefully reduce our impacts."
Fish size diversity was "extremely important" for marine ecosystems, Dr Audzijonyte explained.
"If you think about it, a big tuna behaves very differently from a small tuna.
"They eat different things, they reproduce over different periods of time and they often have more energy reserves to keep them going through low food periods."
Fish diversity in the ocean has been adversely affected by fishing, Dr Audzijonyte believed.
"If the entire fish stock consists of small individuals, which is often the case now in intensively fished areas, this stock doesn't behave in the same way, it doesn't play the same role compared to the stock that has small, medium and large fish.
"I would like to improve our knowledge about fish-size diversity and its changes in the ocean."
Dr Audzijonyte was awarded the fellowship by an independent international committee composed of senior professionals in marine science and conservation.
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