SOMETHING is muscling out species that live with mussels. In the past 40 years, biodiversity in mussel beds along California’s coast has crashed by an average of nearly 60 per cent.
Mussel beds are among the world’s most diverse temperate microhabitats, providing food and shelter for up to 300 invertebrate species at any given location. Jayson Smith of California State University, Fullerton, and his team sampled 22 sites that had been studied in the 1960s and 1970s, using identical sampling methods and plot sizes. They found 24 to 81 per cent fewer species in the beds, the latter figure coming from a site where 141 species…
