Warmer Is Deadlier: A Meta-Analysis Reveals Increasing Temperatures Accentuate Disease Effects on Fisheries Hosts Ecology Letters

We conducted a meta-analysis using 266 effect sizes from 52 empirical papers on harvested aquatic species and determined the relationship between parasite-induced host mortality and temperature and host density. Results demonstrate that warmer temperatures significantly accentuate the effects of disease on fisheries hosts, with increasing temperatures consistently associated with higher parasite-induced mortality across taxa and pathogen types. These findings have important implications for forecasting disease impacts on commercially important fish and shellfish species under climate warming scenarios. Grant no. NA180AR417008 Grant no. NA16NOS4190165