“The big story is that there are a lot fewer zooplankton in
North Inlet than there used to be,” Allen says.
When he began in 1981, a trash-can-sized amount of water
held 10,000 to 12,000 zooplankton specimens.
Over time, the numbers declined. In recent years, they’ve
been catching about 6,000 to 8,000.
“That’s a 40-percent reduction,” he says. “That’s huge, and
it’s remarkable because it happened in just the course of 30
years.”
Rising temperatures might be responsible.
Human activity releases the equivalent of 36 billion tons
of carbon dioxide into the air every year. This CO2 and other
greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere. The ocean,
however, absorbs much of this warmth. Every day, humans
and their machines add heat to the ocean equivalent to
345,000 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs.
This injection of heat has caused the ocean’s temperature
to rise. Arctic and Antarctic ice are melting. And all these
changes affect the mostly hidden world of plankton, the
foundation of the food web.
Allen says they once caught hundreds of anchovies
in trawls like today’s. But in recent years, they’ve caught
one or two per tow, or none at all. Researchers in the
Chesapeake Bay, the West Coast, New England, and Europe
are discovering similar reductions in zoo