Breaking the Food Chain

“Ocean life is being wiped out from the bottom up,” reports the New Scientist. Recall from your high school food chain diagram that the smallest critters are the most important. “The global population of microscopic plants that float in ocean water and support most marine life has declined by 1 per cent every year since 1899. That’s the conclusion of a new study of the microorganisms, published in Nature. The annual falls translate to a 40 per cent drop in phytoplankton since 1950. Boris Worm and his colleagues at Dalhousie University in Canada also noted that the declines had accelerated since 1950. They were correlated with rising sea surface temperatures, suggesting that climate change may be at least partly to blame.”