Our warming sea
BBC radio 4’s excellent ‘Costing the Earth’ ran a 30-minute programme based on the impact that rising sea temperatures will have and what species we are likely to both gain and lose around our coast.
Already we are witnessing a change of planktonplankton Plankton is a generic term for a wide variety of the smallest yet most important organisms form that drift in our oceans. They can exist in larger forms of more than 20cm as the larval forms of jellyfish, squid, starfish, sea urchins, etc. and can be algae, bacterial or even viral down to as small as 0.2µm. They are nutrient and light dependent, and form the essential foodchain baseline for larger dependent aquatic lifeforms. Fish species rely on the density and distribution of zooplankton to coincide with first-feeding larvae for good survival of their larvae, which can otherwise starve. Man-made impacts such as dredging, dams on rivers, waste dumping, etc can severely affect zooplankton density and distribution, which can in turn strongly affect larval survival and thus breeding success and stock strength of fish species and the entire ecosystem. They also form the essential basis of CO2 take up in our seas ecosystem, hence Global Warming. to that normally found in the southern seas, hence the species that feed upon this. Sunfish, sea turtles and basking sharks are appearing whilst cod and haddock are moving north. Exotic whales and dolphins may be coming to us and it is even on the cards that great white sharks may soon visiting our beaches.
If you missed the programme you can still hear it by going to www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b01m0phx
