Researchers at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography just had a paper published in Science that shows that the lifecycle of shrimp throughout the North Atlantic closely matches the bloom of phytoplankton. The researchers used observations from remote sensing satellites to understand the large spatial and long temporal problem, with more than 10 years of data and analysis.
The study suggests that there is a very fine balance between the timing of these two marine phenomenon, and that it wouldn’t take much to disrupt this balance. The temperature at the ocean bottom can change the hatching time of shrimp by as much as four months, and phytoplankton blooms are largely dependent on sunlight and surface water temperatures. A mild increase in surface or bottom temperature could put the two out of phase, with devastating results.
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