On the occasion of the  UN Decade of Ocean Science (#SDG14), which aims to create a common framework to ensure that marine sciences fully support actions to sustainably manage the world’s oceans and seas and achieve the 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals, the CSIC marine centres — IMEDEA, CEAB, ICM, ICMAN and IIM — have organised a joint lecture series entitled “Seamposium: Dealing with new frontiers of marine research”, creating a discussion forum around a monthly seminar delivered by a recognised expert on different marine topics.

The Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT)

Both marine and freshwater fishes are facing the challenges posed by climate change-induced increase in water temperature and habitat deoxygenation, which results in disruptions to their life history and reproductive phenology in addition to distributional shifts and structural changes in the communities of which they are part. These disruptions will intensify the deleterious effects of fisheries on fish communities. This presentation will show how the author’s Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT), and its various corollaries, can help explain these changes, and render superfluous the species- and local-specific (ad hoc) hypotheses that are usually advanced to explain these changes.