Acidic Seawater Makes It More Difficult For Mussels To Stick To Rocks, Fishery Ropes

[hatrack]

EDIT

Carbon from greenhouse gas emissions has steadily turned seawater more acidic, disrupting organisms accustomed to the slightly alkaline waters of the past 20 million years. In the case of mussels, an earlier University of Washington lab study found that increased carbon dioxide weakens the sticky fibers, called byssus, that mussels use to survive by clinging to objects like shorelines or the ropes used by commercial harvesters.

"If byssal thread weakening does eventually become important," Menge added, "the consequences would be major if not catastrophic." Newcomb's goal now is to apply in the real world what was learned in the lab. "Instead of spending a lot of time tightly controlling the temperature and pH conditions mussels grow in, I use the natural seasonal variation to try to answer the same questions," Newcomb said.

EDIT

Prior to the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of manmade CO2, ocean pH averaged 8.2. Today it's 8.1, a 30 percent increase in acidity on the logarithmic scale. Computer models peg ocean acidity at 7.8 to 7.7 by the end of the century at the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington state is a bit ahead of that curve because ancient carbon stores in the deep ocean are periodically churned up by local currents.

The surprising lab discovery was that mussel byssus weakened by 40 percent when exposed to a pH of 7.5. At Penn Cove, low pH levels are not uncommon – Newcomb has even seen 7.4 in the year that she's been sampling.

EDIT

http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2014/09/acidification-mussels

[Stargazer99]

1. Man is killing the planet with his greed

Will the masses start putting an end to the overreach of business when they are almost ready to die?

[GliderGuider]

2. "...when they are almost ready to die?"

Yes. then and only then. But of course the business over-reachers hold all the cards (and all the media and the surveillance equipment and clubs and pepper spray and tear gas and automatic weapons and armed drones ... and all the politicians.)

About the only cards they don't hold (yet) are cell phone videos and the internet.

[hatrack]

3. It'll probably take a few more years for the full-on Praetorian State to emerge . . .

We're pretty much there, but a few legal roadblocks remain.

The enternewscomm complex hasn't quite hit "Full Distract", either. Once it has, though, look for it to run continuously until things fall apart, at which point it will just shut down, its purpose fulfilled.