"So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!" Howard Bale, from the movie, Network.
Here on the Oregon Coast, hypoxia events during summer months are growing in size and duration, and seeing more and more of these biotoxic algal blooms (phytoplankton) making it to the smaller fish like sardines and anchovies, and into oysters and clams, well, the bio-accumulation and bio-toxicity carries up the food chain. Many warnings will be coming in the very near future "don't eat the clams/oyster/fish" admonitions will be sent out as we move into the next decade.
Caren Braby also talked about pyrosomes, sea pickles (each is technically a colony of other multi-celled animals called zooids), that are not normally seen on the coast but are a result of hypoxia. Warming seas. What have you.
We are in some really bizarre times people like Caren Braby have their laurels and positions with the state and other agencies, but in reality, they are making their incomes off of collapse, the sixth mass extinction, and local communities (both human and not) demises. They have skin in the game, but the truly vulnerable who are precarious at work and in their rental situations, who depend on virile economies tied to clean seas, we have more skin in that game.
How's this headline for yet another nighttime Stephen King flick: Box jellyfish will destroy future oceans by gobbling up the food
The reality is many thousands and thousands of out-of-balance changes are occurring at the flora and fauna level, let alone at the chemistry level. So, the most abundant animal on earth, zeroing out because of ocean acidification? Not a fairy tale you want to repeat to your five-year-old for bedtime story telling.
As the oceans become more acidic, box jellyfish may start eating a lot more. Their greedy appetites could have a huge impact on marine ecosystems.
Some of the carbon dioxide we release is dissolving in the oceans, where it becomes carbonic acid making the oceans less alkaline and more acidic. Scientists are scrambling to identify which species will be most impacted.
They are particularly concerned about organisms that play pivotal roles in marine food webs, because if they disappear, entire ecosystems may collapse.
Copepods are particularly critical. These tiny crustaceans are the most abundant animal on earth by mass. They swarm in vast numbers in some regions of the ocean, where larger animals feast on them.
What happens to copepods affects all that depend on them, "which is pretty much everything," says Edd Hammill of Utah State University in Logan.
Previous studies have found copepods may be fairly resistant to ocean acidification. However, these have largely focused on single species, so community-level effects may have been missed.
So these powerful swimmers, halibut, take off when they end up near a hypoxic zone. Entire coastlines (WA and OR) then have had halibut fisheries completely shut down with no halibut to be found.
Maybe the oceans are an allusion to what we have already done to the soil and air and freshwater on land. Not one place on the planet can you take a handful of freshwater from steam, creek, river, lake and be safe from bio-toxins and deadly amoeba. Every person on the planet has mircoplastic in their feces and many compounds like flame retardant in their blood.
And then we are back in the church of the scientist with her proclamation: "Pteropods are the canary in the mine shaft," Care Braby stated.
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