do not suffer If the oceans are heating up due to climate change, which is the only tropical coral reefs. Also, the marine fauna of the coasts of the temperate gets to feel the global warming. How warmer winters will affect individual species, scientists have explored from the Geomar Helmholtz centre for ocean research in Kiel. The researchers working with Frank Melzner found that the also as a delicacy esteemed mussels warmer winters can get bad.
in Order to keep in their experiments, the water temperature is always under control, had put the researchers in each case 500 mussels from November to April in ten elaborately designed pool of the Kiel fjord. Pumps ensured a constant inflow of fresh, if necessary, preheated water from the Baltic sea.
This unfiltered water supplied to the mussels and micro-plankton as food. By Heating or Cooling the water temperatures were regulated so that they were a certain amount above or below in the Fjord, of the measured temperature. With an average of 4.8 degrees in the coldest pool, and 8.2 degrees in the warmest pool, the water temperature was usually slightly higher than the average winter temperatures during the last twenty years (in the Kiel fjord between 2.5 and 6.8 degrees).
Lean mussels
mussels coast can form close-to-reefs: As you strings with elastic Adhesive to your same capture, the mussel shells with the time of a complex three-dimensional Structure, which houses a rich assortment of other sea animals. How quickly such reefs grow, depends on how many clams, the starfish Asterias rubens to the victim. Also in the sea water tank at the Kiel fjord, the mussels had mussels to share their habitat with five copies of this five-armed robber.
As the researchers to Melzer in the “Proceedings of the Royal Society B” to report, survived, although nearly all of the starfish in the Winter. However, only at low water temperatures, they were able to gain body mass. In warmer water, the starfish were instead. Because between the shells of the few shells that they opened each week, was too little Nutritious. Their prey went to high winter temperatures, namely, to the substance. The warmer the water, the leaner the mussels were mussels.
Apparently, the winter wasn’t enough Lich barren plankton offer, in order to meet their greater energy at relatively high temperatures needed. Only in the spring, longer days and more intense solar radiation for single-celled algae multiply rapidly and the mussels can filter out a lot of out of the water.
barnacles do not grow faster
But all the sea creatures that feed on this Plankton, suffer from a mild Winter. The sedentary crustaceans that were caught with the Baltic sea water as tiny larvae in the basin showed: On the walls of the pool of water barnacles of the species Amphibalanus improvisus grew faster the warmer it was there.
That they benefited, contrary to expectations of rising temperatures is suspected that barnacles grow a relatively thick shell of calcareous plates. At low temperatures, when only a little lime in the water dissolves, it will cost so much energy to win with sufficient building material. The water in the Winter was unusually warm, and was compensated for the scanty supply of food for the barnacles likely due to lower construction costs, more than.