Posted on 09/30/2015 6:37:58 AM PDT by Citizen Zed
Warming waters on the Antarctic continental shelf could be inviting to King crabs, a predator that has been unable to live in those chilly waters for tens of millions of years.
Ocean waters are getting hotter, and that could make Antarctica crabby.
Warming global temperatures are prompting many animals to shift their ranges. One of those animals, the King crab, could be moving into shallower waters off the Western coast of Antarctica, where it hasn't been found for tens of millions of years.
The royal crustaceans, Lithodidae, now live on the continental slope off the western Antarctic Peninsula, a surprise to researchers there. Furthermore, there are no longer temperature barriers preventing the crabs from crawling up onto the continental shelf, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is bad news for the crab's prey. King crabs, like lobsters, rays, some fish, and modern sharks, hunt by crushing shells, a tactic that Antarctic animals have not evolved a defense against.
“Marine communities in shallow water environments in Antarctica look vastly different from marine communities elsewhere in the world,” says study lead author Richard Aronson, head of the department of biological sciences at Florida Institute of Technology.
“If you were to go to a museum of natural history and look at the dioramas of life in the ancient seas, you’d be looking at something that doesn’t look all that hugely different from what you see in Antarctica today,” says Dr. Aronson. “The Antarctic communities are in a sense archaic or retrograde because they don’t have modern predators in them.”
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
The entire premise of this article is based on the word “could”.
Crab boats capable of handling the wild weather of Antarctic waters showing up in 3...2...1....
Hasn’t been found for tens of millions of years? So who found them back then? What did they use to find them? Were they aliens? Stupidest read ever!
Any article supposedly based on Science needs to have numbers, ie. how “hot” the water is now and how “hot” it was 1 year ago, 10 years ago. etc. Don’t hold your breath, though.
“The entire premise of this article is based on the word “could”.”
Except of course for the title, where it is stated as a fact.
They may mean that the temperature prediction that comes out of one of their models is increasing.
It's a little hard for me to understand how a region of the ocean that includes a gigantic sheet of ice could go much above the equilibrium temperature of a mixture of ice and seawater, but what do I know.
“could”....”could” be going to the water on Mars, where they haven’t been seen for tens of millions of years.
Oh my.
The crabs have either NEVER been there before, just migrated there or were SEEDED there recently by the “Most Dangerous Catch” gang, or have been there all along.
Crabs are coldblooded; meaning that when it gets too cold, when it’s winter in the southern hemisphere, they merely go dormant?
Somebody is blowing smoke. And I don’t care for smoked crab.
could, may, possibly, predicted to
Yeah, whats wrong with fishing the overabundance of king crab? Tell the Chinese or Japanese.
These chicken little kooks expect the climate to be stagnant and nothing in nature to change, when this is an absolutely, scientific and unnatural expectation and claim.
I read a fascinating article re an edible species of crab native only to Alaskan waters was introduced to the area around northern Finland.
No one knows how they got there but they have been there for a few years.
It hasa been warmer than it has now, and the temperature changes are not even recordable with the most modern of equipment, so how the heel can there be such a huge change in a critters range?
Nicely done!
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