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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Anyone who thinks stopping the swimming pool going green in Summer is a battle is mistaken. According to a recent study, warming reduces the growth rate of plankton, and starves animals up the food chain.
Global warming poses threat to food chains
MARCH 2, 2021 4:14 AM AEDT
Scientists measured the transfer of energy from single-celled algae (phytoplankton) to small animals that eat them (zooplankton).
The study – by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Exeter, and published in the journal Nature – found that 4°C of warming reduced energy transfer in the plankton food webs by up to 56 per cent.
“These findings shine a light on an under-appreciated consequence of global warming,” said Professor Gabriel Yvon-Durocher, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
“Phytoplankton and zooplankton are the foundation of food webs that support freshwater and marine ecosystems that humans depend on. Our study is the first direct evidence that the cost of growth increases in higher temperatures, limiting the transfer of energy up a food chain.”
…
Read more: https://www.miragenews.com/global-warming-poses-threat-to-food-521387/
The abstract of the study;
Warming impairs trophic transfer efficiency in a long-term field experiment
Diego R. Barneche, Chris J. Hulatt, Matteo Dossena, Daniel Padfield, Guy Woodward, Mark Trimmer & Gabriel Yvon-Durocher
In natural ecosystems, the efficiency of energy transfer from resources to consumers determines the biomass structure of food webs. As a general rule, about 10% of the energy produced in one trophic level makes it up to the next1–3. Recent theory suggests this energy transfer could be further constrained if rising temperatures increase metabolic growth costs4, although experimental confirmation in whole ecosystems is lacking. We quantified nitrogen transfer efficiency (a proxy for overall energy transfer) in freshwater plankton in artificial ponds exposed to 7 years of experimental warming. We provide the first direct experimental evidence that, relative to ambient conditions, 4 °C of warming can decrease trophic transfer efficiency by up to 56%. In addition, both phytoplankton and zooplankton biomass were lower in the warmed ponds, indicating major shifts in energy uptake, transformation and transfer5,6. These new findings reconcile observed warming-driven changes in individual-level growth costs and carbon-use efficiency across diverse taxa4,7–10with increases in the ratio of total respiration to gross primary production at the ecosystem level11–13. Our results imply that an increasing proportion of the carbon fixed by photosynthesis will be lost to the atmosphere as the planet warms, impairing energy flux through food chains, with negative implications for larger consumers and the functioning of entire ecosystems.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03352-2
I’d love to know what their secret is. Because the one thing that annoys me about living in the tropics is the the annual battle in Summer to stop the swimming pool turning bright green. I’ll wager my biological battleground tropical swimming pool is a great deal warmer than any pool of gently warmed water in Britain.
Polar Bears are triving because:
Less ice > more sunlight in water > more algae > more fish > more ringed seals > more polar bears
Polar bears have survived everything from the last glacial maximum with frigid dried out Arctic and 100 m lower sea level, to the recent Eemian with 5 degrees warmer than today and sea level up to 10 m higher and an Arctic ice free in summer. Multiple glacial-interglacial oscillations orders of magnitude greater in their ice variation than the miniscule changes being obsessed over today. And polar bears thrived through all of that.
One suspects that their toughness and intelligence allows them to find the good side of climate changes and take advantage of them.
The alarmist-necrophiles are so brainwashed to see only death and disaster among the grandeur of nature and to always find a disaster story in every trivial observation, they must find it hard to imagine seeing the glass ever as half full rather than half empty. But polar bears are not like alarmists at all, they are glass-half-full types. Optimistic and resourceful.
Each artificial pond was only 1m³ in volume
Inoculated with “ambient” temperature organisms
Why not inoculate the “warm” pools with organisms from a +4C temperature region ?
Of course it did, you twerps.
So now they are comparing growth of totally different mixes of species. !
And yes the Dissolved Oxygen was a LOT LESS in the warmed pools, as was the pH
This is what you would expect in a stagnant pond situation.
They have CREATED a hostile environment of low oxygen and lower pH
OF COURSE THEY RESPOND DIFFERENTLY !!
Spirogyra is an alga, not a plankton
Not that that lends any more credibility to anything 😉
The Original Post (O.P.) synopsis of “… finding … increases in the ratio of total respiration …” as alimiter of subsequent nitrogen cycling is unclear to me. Maybe the full text is explicit, but I’ve no time to track it down.
Photo-respiration is a dynamic that releases back out CO2. However, for every CO2 sent out as a consequence of photo-respiration 1 (one) ammonia NH3 is synthesized inside.
The thing worth understanding about photo-respiration in algae is that they are very efficient at using ammonia NH3. (In fact algal blooms off coasts with nitrogen run-off get so extensive, in part, because the algae out compete with bacteria for the ammonia & the algae overtake the bacteria for the environmental niche.)
Then too, the O.P. synopsis is not clear if the “finding” is referring to what is called dark respiration. And, to further confuse the “finding” the synopsis is not clear if they are referring to what is called chloroplast respiration (enzymes catalyzing reduction & oxidation [redox of plastoquinone ] for giving a pH gradient).
Another peculiar thing about the O.P. premise is that when light (photons) hit photosynthetic units it takes longer to evolve oxygen O2 & free up H+ ions (from water splitting) at lower temperatures than at higher temperatures. This is a feature of the chemical processes involved being slower at low temperature.
Let me tell these clever guys something i have a 1500 litre hard rubber black cylinder tank in my garden i use as a fish tank, i have 4 gold fish in it.
I have seeded it with all kinds a insects 3 types of snails worms louse boatmen shrimp all kinds that i ant even name their in there, and thats without all kinds of fly larvae, i mention all that because i dont feed the fish they just live off whats in there.
I’m constantly using a deep fat fryer basket to take out blanket weed its a bloody nuisance, and the water is warm to the touch on the surface.
Everything in that tank in the summer months when that water is warm to the touch is growing like crazy all my aerating plants are bubbling away the marginals a lush green.
No matter how much of that blanket weed i take out it doesnt stop growing and yet the only thing going in the tank is rain water, so it keeps getting its nutrients from somewhere.
So i call bs on their crap because those fish are at the top of the food chain and their quite happy, quite plump and at the top of my little food chain, that i add nothing to i only take away as in the blanket weed and cutting back all the weed at the end of the summer, and that must remove alot of nutrient from the water.
Gee, I thought these bozos wanted to have a diet based on algae and other “green” biologicals.
What did I miss?
Oh god! Have those “scientists” been playing in their laboratory fish tanks again.
“… the one thing that annoys me about living in the tropics is the the annual battle in Summer”
Since when do you get summer in the tropics??
Now that’s what I call climate change!
Are these the same idi0ts who proclaimed a few years ago that global plankton primary productivity had decreased by 40%?
When in fact it has not decreased at all?
I guess as freak-shows like the Paul Ehrlich circus show is that, if you are prophesying environmental doom with an anti-capitalist agenda, you have “diplomatic immunity” from looking stupid.
As for the corals well…umm…err… it might be more like Peter Ridd said it was folks-
Coral count rethinks extinction risk (msn.com)
And in the meant time, the real world shows greening and continuously increasing biomass under conditions of trivial warming and rising atmospheric CO2. Let’s not confuse reality where life thrives with the promised end-of-times religious ecstasty found in an artificially constrained pond persistently annoyed by government grant-funded meddlers.
The transfer of propaganda from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Exeter to the public via the fake news media has increased by 56% as the whole globe cools and the Sun goes into hibernation. Cold and snow records are broken all over the Nothern Hemisphere. Cooling will continue till 2035, and the rest of the century will remain colder than today.
So willing and well-funded green (really red) ‘scientists’ are going into overdrive to tell us more lies, more distortions and more fake results of boguos experiments. Now they’re telling us that animal plankton become too lazy to feed on phytoplankton if temperature rises.
What we do know, and have known for a really long time, is that an overwhelming blossom of algae will use up all oxygen in water and thus kill off all other life. That is probably what these fraudsters re-discovered in their ‘shocking’ experiment. To the rest of us, this is not even news.
Baffle-gab masquerading as science.
Arbitrary values with enough parameters for an elephant to wiggle trunk, tail and hop on one foot.
It is another self satisfaction model…
According to these biased people, mats of algae should never form in summer… Anywhere.