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Our Starving Oceans, the Decline in Plankton Our Starving Oceans: The Decline in Plankton Plankton refers to the whole assortment of tiny, often microscopic, living
marine provinces. Similar communities in different areas of a single province thend to have roughly similar community composition (at least for the more abundant
Submitted by pepe06 on May 31, 2006
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Our Starving Oceans:
The Decline in Plankton
Plankton refers to the whole assortment of tiny, often microscopic, living things in the ocean. These organisms are the starting point, or bottom of the marine food web, and the health of the whole system depend on sufficient plankton levels. There are two primary types of plankton that scientists have been concerned with are phytoplankton and zooplankton. Phytoplankton is the fertilizer for the zooplankton supplying them with important nutrients to survive. Many fish and some mammals depend on them for their food source. As a result, animals higher on the food chain are facing mass starvation. Besides the fact of them being the fundamental food link for the ocean phytoplankton also contributes to the global production of oxygen and carbon dioxide absorption.
Researchers have been observing the trends in the plankton for about 70 years. Sir Alister Hardy invented the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey or CPR for short in 1931. Robert Falcon Scott first used the CPR on the British Royal Research Ship on his expeditions to Antarctica (Kreeger, Gamble 32). The device would record the abundance of plankton in a predetermined volume of water. Hardy had determined that if he deployed several of these devises he could trace seasonal and annual changes in abundances. This data was used to provide a unique base line to compare fluctuations in fish abundance and suspected environmental changes. Mike Colebrook, former director of the survey explains:
As the CPR Survey grew over the decades, in terms of the routes it covered and the decades it spanned, the value of the data has totally transcended the original concepts. Today, the survey is tackling phenomena as large as global climate change. (Kreeger, Gamble 33)
There is an extraordinary list of statistics that convey the survey's history. The CPR has traveled nearly 4,000,000 miles; that's over 150 times around the world by ships from 10...
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