Herring could actually benefit from ocean acidification

Enlarge (credit: Massachusetts Fisheries)

Species don't live in isolation; they live in very tangled, complicated, interconnected webs. So studying them in isolation has only limited utility, much like studying cells cultured in a sterile petri dish. These laboratory studies can yield suggestive and promising results, but these results are not always applicable to how the cells behave in the context of an organism, much less as part of a species in an ecosystem.

The increased carbon dioxide that humanity has been relentlessly pumping into the air since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is acidifying the oceans. Studies done to determine what this ocean acidification will do to fish have mostly assessed the direct effect of elevated CO₂ levels on the fishes' growth and physiology, but they have not taken into account any effects ocean acidification might have on food webs as a whole.

Scandinavian marine biologists have tried to rectify this situation by studying the effects of ocean acidification in 10 mesocosms-fiberglass tanks seeded with rocks, sediment, plankton, and other microorganisms-they set up off the west coast of Sweden. Five were controls; the other five got elevated CO₂, set to mimic levels that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates could occur by the end of this century. Those estimates are about 760 I1/4atm (short for micro-atmospheres) pCO₂, compared to today's 380 I1/4atm pCO₂). Being Scandinavian, these researchers examined the survival of... herring.

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