Giving Compass' Take:
- Tim Radford explains that warmer sea temperatures impact marine habitats and force some species to move, leaving other marine mammals as easy prey.
- Rising sea temperatures due to climate change disrupt marine life food chains and cause dramatic shifts in food webs. What are the long-term consequences for marine life?
- Read how marine animals are struggling to find breathable seas.
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Thanks to climate change, things are going wrong for the right whale. As the Atlantic warms, one ocean giant has had to shift its feeding grounds − and into more dangerous unprotected waters. Other marine mammals will find it harder to survive.
Eubalaena glacialis, or the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, may in the last decade have lost more than a quarter of its population. There could be only 356 individuals left.
And a second, separate study reports that, thanks to climate change, the future also looks lean for ringed seals and other Arctic marine predators: as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, and seas get warmer, the fish these mammals depend on will get smaller, and more scarce.
US scientists report in the journal Oceanography that, because of a shift in ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine − their traditional and protected habitat − the abundance of copepods or tiny crustaceans that nourish the giant mammals has fallen. This in turn has reduced the rates of calving, and forced the whales from their favourite mid-summer feeding grounds to the cooler waters of the Gulf of St Lawrence.
These new feeding grounds have no protection in place to prevent ship strikes, or entanglement in fishing gear. In 2017, biologists confirmed 17 right whale deaths in Canadian waters. Ten were found dead in 2019. In the last two years, there have been four identified deaths. The creature has a normal lifespan of about 70 years.
The Gulf of Maine has been warming at depth, as ocean currents change in response to the climate emergency. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a part of the world climate powerhouse, could be changing, and with it the famous Gulf Stream that brings tropical waters into the North Atlantic.
That too has changed its trajectory in the last 10 years, and is now injecting warmer and saltier water into the Gulf of Maine, to alter the conditions that for most of human history provided food for the whales.
Read the full article about warming seas by Tim Radford at Eco-Business.