Shore Crabs' Reproductive Cycle Interrupted by Climate Change
No-one likes the shore crab. It’s one of the world’s worst alien invasive species, threatening the native wildlife of any new region it invades.
Recently, they have started behaving very strangely. The female crabs have stopped taking care of their own eggs, which is causing crab numbers to dwindle. That should be good news. But this crazy behavior, a new study has found, is symptomatic of a much bigger problem—one that has been coming since the start of the Industrial Age.
Since we started pumping increased amounts of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, we’ve been raising the acidity of the oceans. Carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans to form carbonic acid, and the rate at which this is happening has increased rapidly over the past 200 years. Sour oceans are proving to be bad news for its dwellers.
Brandon Mercado