How Could it Affect Gray Whales?
The north Bering Sea is one of the world’s richest feeding grounds for whales, walruses, and sea birds. Scientists only know some of the ways in which climate change affects marine life. After all, it’s a complex system. Everything is linked to everything else! Here are some of their observations. What other ideas did you come up with? Click each photo to enlarge. A microscopic phytoplankton. An adult gray whale will swallow about 77 tons of food in the Arctic. That’s a LOT of amphipods, which are only a few centimeters long! • Less food available — Microscopic sea plants called phytoplankton are the starting link in the Arctic sea food chain. Each spring as sunlight hours increase, they start to make food and grow under the ice. They grow so fast that they crowd each other out by June. As they suffocate and die, they fall to the muddy bottom. This creates a nutrient-rich food layer. Bottom-dwelling animals such as amphipods — the main food for gray whales — feed on that layer. But as
