Plankton and People
This is a response to Putting Plankton Before People at spiked-online.com.
Are plankton really being put before people? That sounds like a false dilemma.
We probably cannot survive on earth without plankton, and there are signs of serious trouble in the oceans. While I don't think that dams are the principle cause of it, they probably don't help plankton on a local scale if these two studies are correct:
River Influences on Shelf Ecosystems: Introduction and synthesis
Yangtze River floods enhance coastal ocean phytoplankton biomass and potential fish production
One study estimates that in the last sixty years there's been a 40% drop in global phytoplankton populations. See this article at Scientific American and the original paper here.
See also this story about the historical relationship to warming oceans and anoxia, or oxygen starvation and the original paper here.
Quote from the news article: "our analysis has shown that not only was absolute temperature important, but also the rate of change, so the faster the warming, the more expanded these zones are"
A new dead zone has recently been discovered in the Gulf of Mexico.
If we lose enough plankton we could have anoxic events where large quantities of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas are released. If that happens the oceans will outgas methane too and we could lose the ozone layer. Together those events would probably mean our extinction.
Anoxic ocean events are correlated with prior mass extinction events in earth's history. See this paper and this paper for more.
Quoting from the last link: "the ozone shield would have been destroyed, and methane levels would have risen to >100 ppm... persistently high atmospheric H2S levels [were] a factor that impeded evolution of eukaryotic life on land during the Proterozoic."
Eukaryotic life accounts for pretty much every living thing that is visible to the naked eye.
It's also not just the quantity of plankton that matters to our survival either. Plankton include numerous different species grouped into three broad types.
Climate change seems to be causing conditions that are more favorable to diatoms and less to dinoflagellates. See this story and the original paper here.
Climate change includes not just warmer waters but also windier conditions that mix nutrients at the surface differently. Those conditions are apparently more favorable to diatom plankton, which are implicated in toxin build-ups at the base of the food chain for all marine life. There are ongoing die-offs of other species that are probably linked. These are a few that I suspect:
- 20 tonnes of herrings wash ashore in Norway on Near Year's Day
- Dolphins have been stranding and dying on the east coast of the U.S. in record numbers this year
- At least 264 dead dolphins and "vast quantities of dead anchovies" washed ashore this week in Peru
We're in the midst of what is being called the Anthropocene Mass Extinction. Sorting out causes in big die-offs is often difficult--not all of them are caused by human activities. I'm documenting die-off news on this Facebook page.
The stories I've posted there so far this year include the mass deaths of fish, seals, turtles, sea birds, whales, dolphins, oysters and others.
While the surface waters may be mixed more by winds, deeper waters may become more stratified by warming oceans.
If reading about the science isn't your thing, you can always watch David Attenborough and learn that way instead.
"Plankton vs people" isn't just a false dilemma, it's a lose-lose scenario anytime we pit our survival interests against the plankton's.
Mike Lewinski
Stanley, Virginia
Feb 13, 2012
I submitted a slightly modified version of this to spiked.com as a feedback letter.
