Among the labs of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research, or INPA, is what’s known as the “room of the future.” Here, an extreme climate change scenario is being simulated according to projections by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The temperature is around 5° Celsius (9° Fahrenheit) hotter than the average for Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas and the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, and atmospheric CO2 level is higher, at 708 parts per million, than the around 420 ppm level of today. In this room of the future, biologist Samara Souza has carried out an experiment with tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum), exposing these Amazonian freshwater fish not only to these climatic extremes but also to a mix of pesticides that have been found in the rivers and lakes around Manaus. “With climate change, increasing temperatures are not the only factor we need to pay attention to,” says Adalberto Val, coordinator of INPA’s Adapta program, which studies how the Amazon’s aquatic life is coping with climate change. “We should also evaluate the ways in which the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere interact with other degrading factors in the environment like pesticides, forming dangerous synergies.” Souza is a specialist in the effects of contaminants on Amazonian fish, and already had a solid understanding of the ways in which different pesticides affect the animals. Combining these with an extreme climate change scenario is, for her, one way to gain a better understanding of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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