GLOBAL warming could be driving the North Sea ecosystem to the brink of collapse. That stark warning comes from an analysis of nearly half a century of data on the abundance of plankton. Rising temperatures are having a major effect on when these marine animals breed, which in turn is having a profound impact on the food chain.
Martin Edwards and Anthony Richardson at the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science in Plymouth, UK, examined thousands of records of 66 plankton groups collected by ships since 1958. They compared the abundance of different plankton groups with recordings of sea…
