Thermal tolerance and environment adaptability of Indian pompano: Discovery of a resilient candidate species for sustainable mariculture production in a climate change scenario

Abstract

Mariculture, a relatively low-carbon aquaculture sub-sector than other protein producing livestock systems is an important food-producing industry, continues to significantly expand its production at the global scale. Nevertheless, the sector's growth is vulnerable to climate change, typically driven by the temperature in the existing environment. The long-term sustained growth is contingent on the effective mitigations and adaptation to predicted temperature change and its consequences on production. In such perturbations, one of the adaptive strategies is finding a new potential candidate marine fish and documenting its thermal tolerance for adapting it as a climate-resilient species in mariculture systems. Furthermore, understanding the upper and lower thermal tolerance limits of species is of compelling necessity in the process of recommending species' suitability to diversify the mariculture sector other than their natural niche. In this context, an investigation into the thermal adaptability of Indian pompano, Trachinotus mookalee, was tested at six different acclimation temperatures (Tacc), which revealed that the CTmax of the species ranged from 37.02 °C to 43.22 °C and CTmin from 12.66 °C to 19.22 °C. The study derived the Acclimation Response Ratio (ARR) of this species for the first time, and the response was found to be resilient demonstrating the species' adaptability to varying thermal conditions. in the tested temperature range. Hence, we concluded that the species could be a promising candidate for tropical biomes for mariculture development in context of climate change. This could assist the sector to opt for an adaptation (species becoming adjusted to specific conditions) and mitigation strategy against predicted climate change impacts, especially in those regions where climate extremes prevent conventional species farming practices. Also, this study points out the need and pressing priority for estimating the thermal tolerance of cultured aquatic organisms so as to assess their potential to integrate with the projected climate change scenarios in sustainable production systems.