Recalibrating the significance of the decline effect in fish ocean acidification research

Abstract

The recently described decline effect in ocean acidification impacts on fish behaviour should not be equated with negligible effects. Here, existing mechanistic data are used to argue for continued research and cautions against "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

Fig 1. The mean study effect sizes reported by Clements and colleagues [4] represented as a measure of percent impairment.

In this case, the data express effect sizes as a percent decline in behavioural response as a result of ocean acidification exposure, with control values set at 100%. The grey box denotes the mean and upper and lower 95% confidence intervals (62.6 ± 5.2%; N = 91). The pink dots denote individual study means, and the purple dots denote the mean ± SEM of a given year. The solid black line denotes the meta-regression line for 2011–2018 (p = 0.03; R² = 0.05; N = 88). All data are publicly available through Dryad under doi: 10.5061/dryad.866t1g1vr.