Rich Aronson: Up until now, it’s been too cold for crabs to manage to survive in Antarctica. But now, as the climate is warming, those barriers are coming down.
Rich Aronson is a marine scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.
Rich Aronson: And we can anticipate that if things go in the unfortunate direction that they’re going, they will have an enormous effect on the bottom communities living there.
Aronson told EarthSky that warming waters will probably allow predator king crabs to invade populations of soft-shelled creatures.
Rich Aronson: As the shallow waters warm up, those king crabs will come trotting up from deep water and invade those shallow environments. Likely, the first thing they will do is decimate the brittle stars that are there in enormous numbers.
Also, cold-adapted starfish, clams, and snails would have nowhere to escape.
Rich Aronson: If these crabs make it into shallow water environments – which they will if we don’t get a handle on global carbon emissions right now – they are going to homogenize the marine communities in Antarctica with communities around the world. The world will be a less rich place as this happens.
Our thanks to:
Rich Aronson
Dauphin Island Sea Lab
University of South Alabama
Dauphin Island, AL
Oceans warm and cool in cycles, and have since the beginning of life in the seas. In the geologically recent past there have been periods both warmer and colder than the present, and life either adapts to these variations or goes extinct…Sorry…that’s been going on since creation…oops…you don’t believe in creation do you? Let’s say the dawn of time then.
First, There is nothing to indicate that global warming is manmade unless it’s “Mann-made”, i.e., invented from whole cloth and bollixed numbers, like a hockey stick graph.
Second, climate has been both warmer and colder than it is now in the accessibly recent past, as evidenced in the geological and glacial record. Polar bears did not go extinct in the medieval warm period, and in fact are genetically indistinguishable from the Grizzly Bears further south…they are Grizzlies that adapted to an unfilled predator niche in the far north.
It’s not the end of the world if King crabs invade antarctic waters…and when the climate cools off again, they will either cold-adapt or die off themselves, leaving a niche for other life forms.
Get real, Mr. Aronson.