OA and Me!?
The Effects of Ocean Acidification on the Marine Food Chain
In addition to decreasing ocean pH, ocean acidification also causes a reduction in available carbonate ions which are essential to shell-building across many different groups of marine organisms. Many of these organisms form the very basis of the marine food chain, and their disappearance could potentially lead to a domino-like effect that will impact everyone.
OA Facts Sheet
25%
Average Daily
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50%
Annual Growth
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65%
Monthly Spending
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25%
Average Daily
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Nature Story Telling
A SHELLFISH STORY
Retrieved from: This Is Your Ocean on Acid, and It’s Not Pretty
By Brita Belli, The Environment Magazine
For centuries, shellfish farmers have cultivated oysters in Washington’s Willapa Bay, a massive, shallow estuary separated from the Pacific Ocean by the Long Beach Peninsula. The bay’s warm waters are particularly suited for growing Pacific oysters, identified by their rough, fluted shells marked with purple streaks, and a white interior bearing “a single muscle scar that is sometimes dark, but never purple or black,” according to a Biological Report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The oyster was imported from Japan to the western U.S. coast in 1903. “Puget Sound and Washington waters are a little bit cold compared to what the oyster had in Japan,” says Dewey. “So it doesn’t reproduce particularly well here. Except for a few areas — Willapa Bay is one of them. There’s dependable natural reproduction from one year to the next. The water basically has to get up to 72 degrees and stay there for three weeks for the oysters to spawn.”
"Shellfish are also being affected by ocean acidification, much to the dismay of shellfish farmers."
Credit: Vicki and Chuck Rogers/flickr.
Beginning in 2005, these oysters in the bay, known as natural sets, stopped reproducing. They have never successfully reproduced since. In 2006, the hatchery-produced Pacific oysters followed suit. In the hatcheries, spawning happens year-round in conditioning tanks where water temperature and algae levels (for food) are closely controlled. Both Taylor Shellfish and Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Tillamook, Ore., witnessed oyster larvae die-offs that they couldn’t explain and that continued for years. Initially, they suspected a bacteria known as Vibrio tubiashii was to blame. But even after Whiskey Creek installed an expensive filtration system, the oyster larvae continued to die......
Why?
Why the oyster larvae continue to die?
Story recap:
Initially, they suspected a bacteria known as Vibrio tubiashii was to blame. But even after Whiskey Creek installed an expensive filtration system, the oyster larvae continued to die......
By 2008, Whiskey Creek, which alone accounts for 75% of all oyster seedlings used by West Coast oyster farmers, had lost 80% of its oyster larvae. Taylor Shellfish had lost 60%. Despite the controlled environment, the ocean water they were pumping into their hatcheries was corrosive. Upwelling — or deep ocean water rising to the surface following north winds off the Washington coast — was carrying acidic water to the surface. The shellfish farmers were experiencing the devastating impacts of ocean acidification sooner than researchers had anticipated.
What next? Why should I care about it?
The fact is that there was a natural acidification event millions of years ago, which was much slower than what we're encountering today.
What is interesting and somehow worth noticing is that this event coincided with a mass extinction of many marine species.
So is that what we're headed for? Well, maybe.
Ocean Acidification & Marine Food Web
One of the big concerns of OA is as ocean acidity increases, the concentration of carbonate ions in seawater decreases. These ions are the basic building blocks for many marine species to make their skeletons - corals and building up coral reef - or shells, crabs, mussels, and oysters, for example.
However, how this can affect you and me?
In general, these species are usually at the bottom of the marine food web. Since these shelled organisms are directly affected by OA, other species are affected indirectly through feeding on these organisms or living in habitats they create such as coral reefs. In other words, the impacts of OA could affect right up through the food chain and the ecosystems. And finally, right onto our dinner plates.
Coral reefs support 25 percent of all marine life in the entire ocean
All marine life
Ocean Acidification Fact Sheet
Ocean acidification affects the marine ecosystems one way or another; it represents yet another stress on marine environments that may endanger the flow of goods and services to marine-dependent communities:
Humans around the world depend on the ocean for food, water quality, storm buffering, and many other important functions. Disruptions to marine ecosystems can alter these relationships.
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