Achi news desk-
A micropaleontologist from the University of Victoria found that marine plankton could act as an early warning system before a mass extinction occurs.
With help from colleagues at the University of Bristol and Harvard, Andy Fraass’ latest paper in the journal Nature shows after analysis of the fossil record that plankton community structures change before a mass extinction event.
“One of the main findings of the paper was how communities respond to past climate events depending on the previous climate,” Fraass said in a news release. “That means that much more effort needs to be spent to understand recent communities, before industrialisation. We need to work out what community structure looked like before human-caused climate change, and what has happened since then, to do a better job of predicting what will happen in the future.”
According to the statement, the fossil record is the most complete and extensive archive of biological changes available to science and by applying advanced computational analyzes to the archive, researchers were able to detail the global community structure of the oceans that n dating back millions of years.
A key finding of the study was that during the “early eocene climatic optimum,” a geological period with persistently high global temperatures corresponding to today’s worst-case global warming scenarios, marine plankton communities shifted to higher latitudes and only the most specialized plankton remained near the equator, suggesting that the tropical temperatures inhibited greater biodiversity.
“Given that three billion people live in the tropics, the lack of biodiversity at higher temperatures is not great news,” paper co-leader Adam Woodhouse said in the statement.
Next, the team plans to apply similar research methods to other marine plankton groups.
Read More: Global study, UVic researcher analyzes how mammals responded during pandemic
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