A new study conducted by the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed that the acidity of the waters in the West Coast started dissolving the shells of the marine snails in the area.
The snails, called pteropods, are eaten by different fish species in the area including herring, mackerel and salmon. According to the researchers, the pteropods found in the area whose shells are affected by ocean acidification are at 50 percent its population. The research also maps the flow of the acidic waters from the continental shelf from April to September.
"Our findings are the first evidence that a large fraction of the West Coast pteropod population is being affected by ocean acidification," Nina Bednarsek, Ph.D. said in a news release.
Ocean acidification refers to the process by which the ocean water becomes corrosive when they absorb too much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This change in chemistry can heavily affect marine life, especially organisms which have parts made up of calcium carbonate like the skeletons and shells of oysters, mussels, coral and others.
The team, which consisted of members from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Oregon State University, also discovered that the most numbers of pteropods with dissolving shells could be found along the continental shelf from Washington to California. The pteropods were sampled using a fine mesh net.
"We did not expect to see pteropods being affected to this extent in our coastal region for several decades," an oceanographer at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center and one of the paper's co-authors, William Peterson, Ph.D. said in a news release. He further explained that this study's significance lies in the fact that it could help surface the trends by which ocean acidification affects marine organisms.
Further details of the study were published in the May 3 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
