MARK COLVIN: Researchers at James Cook University have found that acid in the ocean is doing strange things to fish. The acid that they’ve been looking at is carbonic acid; it’s created by carbon dioxide in the ocean.

There are fears that human-induced climate change will make the world’s oceans more acidic. The scientists wanted to know what effect that would have on fish.

Felicity Ogilvie reports.

FELICITY OGILVIE: In the waters off southern Papua New Guinea, underwater volcanoes are releasing carbon dioxide into the ocean. When the carbon dioxide dissolves it creates carbonic acid.

For Professor Philip Munday from James Cook University, it’s a natural laboratory to study what effect ocean acidification has on fish.

PHILIP MUNDAY: These are quite unique areas of coral reef where there are carbon dioxide bubbles coming up from deep underground, through the reef and into the ocean water above the reef, and that causes the water around these, what we call ‘CO2 seeps’, to actually become acidified, become more acidic – in a way that’s very similar to what we would expect in the second half of this century if we keep putting carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and then some of those get absorbed by the […]