Bering Sea Warming Up

Posted by Douglas DuHamel May 11, 2008

The Bering Sea produces 50% of all fish caught in America and 1/3 all the fish caught world wide. Chances are the last fish you ate came from the Bering Sea.

Studies and experiments are suggesting the ecosystem will support less than what we are harvesting, like the Pollock and Hake. The Bering Sea is showing climate changes before the rest of the oceans so this may be a sign of things to come.

It is much warmer now and marine mammals and birds are having mass die offs, and there’s many invasive species. In general, it’s going through massive chances to a more temperate ecosystem that is not going to be as productive as the last. The effects of carbon dioxides are often over looked by the general public.

It’s good that people are starting to worry about melting ice and rising water levels world wide. We are only now starting to see a comprehensive change in the world’s ecosystem, and some of these changes don’t look great for the future.

Phytoplankton takes sun light and converts carbon dioxide into carbon based foods. Small fish eat the plankton, and bigger fish eat the smaller fish, and an entire ecosystem develops which just keeps repeating its self until some thing in the system is disturbed.

The Bering Sea is very productive thanks to diatoms a large type of phytoplankton. Large diatoms are eaten by large zooplankton in turn are eaten by large fish. When the phytoplankton becomes scarce the zoo plankton becomes scarce and all the sea creatures that eat the diatoms and zooplankton will also become scarce.

Thus the ecosystem seems to be changing in a way that doesn’t support the top predators, and the top of that list is MAN!