Friday, April 29, 2011

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Boom and bust signals ecosystem collapse, at BBC:
The Peter Lake food web contained four key components. Insects such as fleas ate tiny water-borne plants, small fish such as golden shiners ate the fleas, and much bigger largemouth bass ate the little fish.
Beginning in 2008, the researchers began to add more bass, and more than a thousand hatched the following year.
Sensing the threat from these predators, the golden shiners began to spend more time in the shallows or sheltering under floating logs.
Larger fleas moved in, eating the floating plants (phytoplankton).
But the changes were anything but smooth, with wildly varying numbers of fleas and phytoplankton seen at different times.
Eventually, by late 2010, the ecosystem appeared to have finalised its transition from one stable state to another.
This second state, dominated by fleas and largemouth bass, is similar to the situation that had existed for years in neighbouring Lake Paul.
This lake showed no major changes during the three years, indicating that the changes seen in Peter really were caused by the addition of bass.
I would guess that most people in western Ohio understand that large population increases of blue-green algae in Grand Lake St. Mary's signals an ecosystem collapse.  Some just don't want to believe why that is occurring.

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