A recent study indicates that the warming ocean climate will cause one-quarter of Australia’s temperate seaweed species to face extinction by 2070, reports United Press International and Discovery News. Researchers found that temperate seaweed communities have become increasingly subtropical over the past 50 years as the oceans have rapidly warmed. They examined thousands of herbarium records of Australian algae dating to the 1940s. The findings published in the journal Current Biology, represent two of the major global oceans, the Indian and Pacific. “We estimated that projected ocean warming could lead to several hundred species retracting south and beyond the edge of the Australian continent, where they will have no suitable habitat and may therefore go extinct,” said lead author Thomas Wernberg. These threatened species represent a quarter of Australia’s temperate algal species. This could have cascading effects across marine ecosystems, Wernberg said, as seaweeds are the “trees of the ocean,” providing food, shelter and habitat to a diversity of other species. And each of those communities is as unique as the seaweed that supports it
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Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/10/27/Seaweeds-said-vulnerable-to-climate-change/UPI-41801319754495/#ixzz1eyDjMBbl
http://news.discovery.com/earth/seaweed-moving-south-to-beat-the-heat-111028.html
For more information, see the paper: Wernberg, T, BD Russell, MS Thomsen, C Frederico, D Gurgel, CJA Bradshaw, ES Poloczanska and SD Connell (2011) Seaweed communities in retreat from ocean warming. Current Biology doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.028
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