Algal turfs (brown fuzzy stuff) are overgrowing the hard corals at high CO2 concentrations near volcanic vents – a good “natural” experiment. Note also that the seagrass (green, long leaves) are also doing well – a subject for another post.
We frequently hear about “climate change” in the media these days. How could you avoid it? If you do a search of the scientific literature there are thousands of publications a year on the topic. When thinking about the worlds oceans, the most common things that we hear about are ocean warming or ocean acidification (aka. the “evil twin” of warming). Do you notice somthing about this statement? We hear about warming OR acidification. But is this a realistic scenario?
We as scientists commonly break things down into their components and try to understand them one at a time. This is understandable, because the best way to comprehend the functioning of amazingly complex systems is to break them down their component parts and then put them back together again. In this case, however, we are just starting to understand that by breaking things down to individual conditions, either temperature or acidification, we may be missing the most important part of the study. My research group started to realise this in 2009 when we discovered that, when increased in combination, carbon dioxide and nutrients had a massive effect on the growth of “weedy” species of algae which can help to maintain the loss of kelp forests (download the paper here). In hindsight, this result should not be so surprising – both carbon and nitrogen are resources which the algae use to grow. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?
What was surprising is that when carbon dioxide was elevated in the absence of nutrients these algae didn’t respond by grow faster. In fact, they didn’t respond at all to the increased availability of carbon. This means that CO2 and nutrients cause a synergistic response in these algae – where the response to the combined conditions is greater than the sum of responses to the individual conditions (see here for a good review on the topic).
What now worries us is that increasing availability of carbon in the oceans will happen with ocean warming – these are not either/or conditions. Indeed, the first warning shots were fired when we discovered that these same “weedy” turf algae showed the same synergistic growth in response to combined CO2 and warming (see our results published here). We can do something about nutrient pollution (something I will post on in the near future), but CO2 and warming are inherently linked. I think it is time to not talk about warming or acidification but rather to discuss them in tandem.
Active Oceans 