{"id":209146,"date":"2021-03-16T16:23:07","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T20:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/?p=209146"},"modified":"2021-12-09T14:10:38","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T19:10:38","slug":"in-the-pacific-global-warming-disrupted-the-ecological-dance-of-urchins-sea-stars-and-kelp-otters-help-restore-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/2021\/03\/16\/in-the-pacific-global-warming-disrupted-the-ecological-dance-of-urchins-sea-stars-and-kelp-otters-help-restore-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Pacific, Global Warming Disrupted The Ecological Dance of Urchins, Sea Stars And Kelp. Otters Help Restore Balance."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Along parts of the U.S. Northeast Coast, kelp forests are being replaced by a less productive ecosystem of low-slung, turf-like algae mats that don\u2019t provide cover for juvenile fish, said\u00a0Montclair State University\u00a0marine ecologist\u00a0<a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ColetteFeehan\" target=\"_blank\">Colette Feehan<\/a>, who tracked the changes in a 2020 Scientific Advances\u00a0<a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-020-70273-x\" target=\"_blank\">study<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Northern California kelp study is \u201cparticularly significant in that it demonstrates that marine ecosystems can reach \u2018tipping points\u2019 at which abrupt or sudden losses of species occur due to compounding climate-change stressors,\u201d Feehan said.<\/p>\n<p>Kelp is not mobile, \u201cso they can\u2019t track climate change the way a fish can,\u201d she said. Some kelp species can only disperse across tens of kilometers, she added, so if they are wiped out across larger areas, recolonization becomes very difficult and slow.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to protecting shorelines by dampening strong waves, Feehan said kelp oxygenates coastal waters and abates ocean acidification by taking carbon dioxide out of the system, storing it and sequestering it in\u00a0 deep water offshore when it dies and sinks.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA loss of kelp forests means losing that carbon sequestration,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Feehan&#8217;s contribution is part of a larger story, read the full piece on <a rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https:\/\/insideclimatenews.org\/news\/16032021\/pacific-ocean-climate-change-kelp-urchin-sea-otter-sea-stars\/\" target=\"_blank\">Inside Climate News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When ocean heat waves and a sea star disease devastated kelp forests that are critical to sea life and the California urchin fishing industry, sea otters came to the rescue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":209147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7,42,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biology","category-research","category-in-the-media","category-marine-biology-coastal-sciences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210225,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209146\/revisions\/210225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/csam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}