Box jellyfish may eat up the oceans

• Autores: Christie Wilcox
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3143, 2017, pág. 14
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • As the oceans become more acidic, box jellyfish may start eating a lot more. Their greedy appetites could have a huge impact on marine ecosystems. To find out, Edd Hammill of Utah State University and his colleagues collected copepods and one of their predators, the box jellyfish Carybdea rastoni, from the waters around Australia. They kept the plankton in tanks containing either ambient seawater or seawater acidified at levels predicted for 2100, then added box jellyfish to half of each set of tanks. After 10 days, they counted what survived. Both acidification and box jellyfish reduced the number of copepods, but the two together caused 27 per cent more deaths than the sum of the two individually. The jellyfish were eating more: they ate nearly 37 per cent of copepods in the ambient seawater tanks, but almost 83 per cent in the acidified water