Water-breathing ectotherms underpin aquatic biodiversity and sustain many of the ecosystem functions and services on which human societies depend. They are fundamental to understanding population dynamics, food web structure, fisheries productivity, and the functioning of ocean, freshwater, and Earth systems.
As warming and deoxygenation are intensifying across aquatic environments, there is an urgent need for robust, generalizable explanations of how these organisms grow, reproduce, and persist. This Fisheries Centre Research Report addresses precisely this challenge, and is exceptional in both scope and substance.
The discussion of scientific debate surrounding the Gill-Oxygen Limitation Theory (GOLT) is particularly timely. In fields characterized by complexity and heterogeneity, individual studies rarely provide definitive resolution. Progress instead depends on evaluating bodies of evidence, methodological robustness, and coherence across taxa and levels of organization. This volume emphasizes the importance of such standards, highlighting how differences in data selection, analytical choices, and interpretation can shape conclusions. It thus contributes not only to the empirical assessment of the GOLT, but also to broader discussions about how theories should be tested, challenged, and refined in complex ecological systems.
What emerges is the product of decades of sustained scholarly effort to establish a unifying framework for understanding the growth of WBE. In doing so, it challenges the scientific community not only to further test the GOLT, but also to propose genuinely competing theories capable of explaining the same broad range of observed phenomena. This report will be valuable to researchers, students, and practitioners seeking to understand aquatic life in a rapidly changing world, and it exemplifies the kind of integrative, critical scholarship that the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries support.