The last fish you ate probably came from the Bering Sea. But during this century, the sea's rich food web-stretching from Alaska to Russia-could fray as algae adapt to greenhouse conditions. "All the fish that ends up in McDonald's, fish sandwiches-that's all Bering Sea fish," said USC marine ecologist Dave Hutchins, whose former student at the University of Delaware, Clinton Hare, led research published Dec. 20 in Marine Ecology Progress Series, a leading journal in the field.
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The study examined how climate change affects algal communities of phytoplankton, the heart of marine food webs. Phytoplankton use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into carbon-based food. As small fish eat the plankton and bigger fish eat the smaller fish, an entire ecosystem develops.
The Bering Sea is highly productive thanks mainly to diatoms, a large type of phytoplankton. "Because they're large, diatoms are eaten by large zooplankton, which are then eaten by large fish," Hutchins explained.
The scientists found that greenhouse conditions favored smaller types of phytoplankton over diatoms. Such a shift would ripple up the food chain: as diatoms become scarce, animals that eat diatoms would become scarce, and so forth.
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http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Greenhouse_Ocean_May_Downsize_Fish_999.html
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