Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean
Jeremy Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease. His new paper, "Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean," is published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences doi/10.1073/pnas.0802812105.
The study includes overfishing, but expands to include threats from areas such as nutrient runoff that lead to so-called "dead zones" of low oxygen and also it incorporates increases in ocean warming and acidification resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.