The census story mentioned that sea critter data could be uploaded to Plos One - a site devoted to accelerating scientific knowledge by making it available online. I checked it out and they have lots of it. Curious about invasive species, I trolled around and found an interesting paper. I didn't digest all of it but the paper makes the point that when a species is introduced or eliminated from an ecosystem, it has ramifications throughout the food web. It cites an example from this region, where dwindling cod means growing sea urchins and that in turn impacts kelp. I'm still not getting the 'double whammy' part where the effect is excerbated by disease in the kelp stocks. I guess I should give it another read (after I find the invasive species for this week [thanks to Kelly Bates for the original inspiration])
here is the link to the article, and by regression, to the pLoS ONE site:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000295
No comments:
Post a Comment