Algal turfs overgrowing corals under acidified conditions at CO2 seeps, which we use at “natural experiments”. Note that the seagrass in the middle of the photo also grow well under these conditions.
It has been a while since my last post, for which I apologise, but I have just emerged from a particularly busy period. I was lucky enough to be invited to an ocean acidification round table at the Peter Wall Institute in Vancouver late last year and we have been madly working on multiple papers since then (and I also had a short break over the Christmas week because of sheer exhaustion!). Why are we working so madly to get the papers written? Because the topic of the meeting is both topical and imminently important: how do we predict the ecosystem-level impacts of ocean acidification, and what can we do about it?
Why is this such an important question? The simple answer is that ocean acidification is a direct consequence of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s simple, indisputable chemistry. As CO2 dissolves into seawater it forms carbonic acid, finally reducing the amount of carbonate in the water (a good diagram of this reaction can be found here). The early research into this field (only 10 years ago now!) focussed entirely on calcifying species, such as gastropods and corals, because they use this carbonate to form their hard structures (calcium carbonate). What we’ve realised more recently, and a big part of my research program, is tha t the extra Carbon in the system (in the form of CO2) is also a resource for some algae and plants, potentially causing a change in the dominant species in ecosystems (see my photo of a “future” coral reef and kelp forest in this post).
Algal turfs dominating under acidified conditions at cold-water (temperate) CO2 seeps, which we use at “natural experiments”. You can just see the fronds of a solitary kelp plant in the right of the photo, otherwise they are rare at the site (when they should be 8 – 10 plants per metre!).
I’m happy to say that we made real progress in trying to understand what the likely ecosystem effects are globally, and more importantly the things that we need to know into the future. I won’t pre-empt our publications, but the synopsis is that ecosystems will change, and for the worse. This has been highlighted before, including for Australia, but for the first time I think we’re starting to get at understanding the ecological mechanisms (which is essential if we are to help the systems resist this change!).
Lead by Prof. Chris Harley, and including an amazing group of contributors, I’d say it was the most successful round-table that I’ve been involved with and we’ll have some good papers coming out soon (I’ll be sure to post about them!). If you’re interested in the topic and want more information, I strongly suggest that you watch this video of the public event we held as part of the week’s activities.
Digitial library links for:Falkenberg et al. 2013
Russell et al. 2013
Active Oceans 