Ocean Acidification Fails to Impact the Behavior and Body Size of a Common Copepod
Paper Reviewed: Almén, A.-K., Brutemark, A., Jutfelt, F., Riebesell, U. and Engström-Öst, J. 2017. Ocean acidification causes no detectable effect on swimming activity and body size in a common copepod. Hydrobiologia 802: 235-243.
Ocean acidification (defined as a decline in oceanic pH caused by the dissolution of atmospheric CO2 into the surface waters of the world’s oceans) has been projected to impact marine life in a number of different ways, including growth, survival, fertility, calcification and organism behavior.
Although much research has been conducted to date on this topic, there still remains much to be learned. And in this regard, Almén et al. (2017) note in their recent study that information on the effects of ocean acidification on copepod behavior and activity is lacking. And, therefore, they set out to remedy this situation.
The objective of Almén et al.’s work was to investigate both the acute and long-term impacts of a 0.22 pH unit decline (corresponding to a pCO2 increase from 450 to 700 µatm) on Pseudocalanus acuspes, a marine pelagic crustacean that inhabits both the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The specific behaviors analyzed pertained to the copepod’s swimming activities, where the authors used digital cameras and software to quantify a given animal’s total activity, number of stops, freeze duration, medium speed count, medium speed duration, burst speed counts and burst speed duration in real-time.
In the long-term experiment, such behaviors were analyzed for copepods that were grown/reared in mesocosms deployed in the Gullmar Fjord on the west coast of Sweden, half of which had CO2 added to reduce the pH to the targeted level (pH of ~7.7) and half of which contained normal seawater to serve as a control (normal pH of ~7.9). Following a two-month incubation period, copepods from both the normal and reduced pH seawater mesocosms were transferred to a controlled-environment laboratory, where after an acclimation period, they were subjected to the behavior analyses. For the acute exposure experiment, a portion of the specimens from the control mesocosms were placed in elevated pCO2 seawater at the laboratory, whereupon their behavioral responses were examined following a 20-hour incubation period. And what did these two experiments reveal?
According to Almén et al., “there was no significant effect of CO2 on [copepod behavior] in chronic high-CO2, nor significant effect after the 20-hour acute exposure.” The authors also report that copepod prosome length (a measure of body size that they hypothesized might be reduced in the long-term elevated pCO2 treatment) was unaffected by ocean acidification. And as a result of these findings, the five researchers conclude that “P. acuspes [does] not show sensitivity to near-future pCO2 levels.”
Read more at www.co2science.org
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Absolutely impossible!
Volcanism and our oceans control atmospheric CO2 .. period! .. and there isn’t a thing us puny little humans can do about it!
Our oceans are HUGE. Most people can’t even grasp the enormity of our oceans. Just in surface coverage alone they are enormous spanning more than 72% of the surface area of the Earth! … that is HUGE! .. The overwhelming majority of our planet is ocean.
But what is really astounding, is just how much water there really is on this planet. The average depth of our oceans is more than 4 kilometers (over 2.5 miles!). That is deep, really deep! .. It is estimated that there are 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water on our planet, with more than 97% of that being sea water (oceans). We truly live on a water planet.
In addition there is a lot of CO2 absorbed in our oceans, a whole lot!. Consider this, just the first 3 meters (9.8 fee) of sea water contains more CO2 than all of the atmosphere above it. Let that sink in for just one moment. Less than 10 feet of the top water of our oceans (which cover 72% of our planet, at an average depth of more than 2.5 miles) has more CO2 than all of the atmosphere above it!
Currently, our atmosphere only contains approximately 400ppm of CO2. That is absolutely nothing. CO2 is barely even present in our atmosphere, just a tiny trace gas and dangerously close to insufficient quantity to support life on this planet. You can dissolve all of our atmospheric CO2 into our oceans and you would not drop the average pH by even 0.00001 mole fraction. In fact, the change would be so slight, it is doubtful that we even have instrumentation sensitive enough to detect the change.
What am I getting at? .. Our oceans and volcanism control our atmospheric CO2 concentrations, PERIOD! .. humans are completely incapable of affecting our atmospheric CO2 concentration to any meaningful way. Even the IPCC claims that human contribution to the 100ppm rise of the past 100 years is only 4% (4ppm of a 100ppm rise)! .. And I believe that percentage is actually greatly overestimated (the “real” value being closer to 1% or less).
“ocean acidification” via atmospheric CO2 is absolutely impossible, there simply is not enough CO2 in our atmosphere to even make a detectable dent. do the math! .. It doesn’t work. You can’t get there from here.
Bottom line, volcanism and our oceans control our atmospheric CO2 … and there is absolutely nothing us puny little humans can do about that!
Our oceans are capable of swallowing up virtually all of our atmospheric CO2 without even a little hiccup. Which is scary because we only have about 200ppm to deal with and our planet becomes uninhabitable. That is, drop below 200ppm and we will basically starve to death as plant life fades from existence.
We humans could stop producing CO2 completely, and the rest of the planet wouldn’t even know it. It just doesn’t matter. We humans do a whole lot of other things that negatively impact our planet in a much bigger way than CO2 .. by far!
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