Fishery Collapse Near Venezuela Linked to Climate Change

Fishery Collapse Near Venezuela Linked to Climate Change

ScienceDaily (Oct. 18, 2012) — Even small increases in temperature from global warming are causing climatology shifts harmful to ocean life, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science shows. Modest changes in temperature have significantly altered trade wind intensity in the southern Caribbean, undercutting the supply of key phytoplankton food sources and causing the collapse of some fisheries there.

"Global warming isn't occurring uniformly over the Earth's surface -- it's been much greater at the high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere than it has been for the low latitudes," said co-author Robert Thunell, a University of South Carolina researcher. "Because of that, some people have said, 'Well, we're probably not going to see much biotic change at low latitudes,' but we show nicely in this paper that even when the climatological changes are relatively modest, they can have a big impact on the marine ecosystem."

The paper is the product of nearly 15 years of observations in a highly collaborative NSF-funded effort between researchers at USC, Stony Brook University, the University of South Florida and several Venezuelan institutions. Since late 1995, monthly observations of a range of variables, from nutrient and chlorophyll concentrations to meteorological readings, have been collected at a single location off the coast of Venezuela to establish a long-range record.

The sea surface temperature was found to have increased somewhat, about 1 degree Celsius, over the decade-and-a-half. But the effect on the sea life was much more pronounced: beginning in 2006, the population of microscopic diatoms, dinoflagellates and coccolithophorids plummeted, along with the local harvest of sardines.

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