Seaweed records show impact of ocean warming (Australian seaweed moving South toward extinction)

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http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/cp-srs102111.php

Public release date: 27-Oct-2011

Contact: Elisabeth (Lisa) Lyons
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617-386-2121
http://www.cellpress.com/">Cell Press

Seaweed records show impact of ocean warming

As the planet continues to warm, it appears that seaweeds may be in especially hot water. New findings reported online on October 27 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, based on herbarium records collected in Australia since the 1940s suggest that up to 25 percent of temperate seaweed species living there could be headed to extinction. The study helps to fill an important gap in understanding about the impact that global warming is having on the oceans, the researchers say.

"Our findings add an important piece in the puzzle that is determining the global impacts of climate change," said Thomas Wernberg of the University of Western Australia.

"We found that temperate seaweed communities have changed over the past 50 years to become increasingly subtropical, and that many temperate species have retreated south towards the Australian south coast. By extending the observed rates of poleward retreat to other species in the southern Australian seaweed flora, we estimated that projected ocean warming could lead to several hundred species retracting south and beyond the edge of the Australian continent, where they will have no suitable habitat and may therefore go extinct."

The magnitude of the shifts the researchers observed are consistent with patterns of observed warming in those areas.

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