How long would it take to see effects on the whole food chain within the Southern Ocean?
That’s a good question. I wouldn’t be able to comment on the Southern Ocean as a whole because right now we just don’t know enough. We don’t have a strong enough sampling intensity. In the case of the North Sea I think the evidence there was that you could see changes in the abundance of cod and other fish stocks within a year of changes in the plankton population. It’s possibly because the fish larvae are dependant on the plankton as a source of food. Cod and herring are dependent on copepods such as plankton, so the response there is fairly quick. Changes like that have an immediate ecological impact, and in some cases, they could have an immense economic impact, too. We’ve seen something like this happen in the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea when ctenophores (comb jellies) came in to the ecosystems and wiped out all the plankton more or less, leaving nothing for the sprat herring to feed on, which in turn led to a major decline in the population of the sprat herring. If you’ve only g
