Deep-Sea Cukes Can’t Avoid the Weather: El Niño changes life 2.5 miles down
By Susan Milius
Even though the water now deep in the ocean won’t mingle with upper layers for hundreds of years, topside climate still drives the short-term booms and busts of bottom dwellers.
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That’s the conclusion of a 14-year study of sea cucumbers, brittle stars, and other mobile bottom dwellers off the California coast, says Henry A. Ruhl of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. What links the top to the bottom is the fall of dead plankton and other debris that provides food in the depths, he and Kenneth L. Smith Jr., also of Scripps, say in the July 23 Science. They link changes in the abundance of certain species some 2.5 miles underwater to the El Niño and La Niña weather shifts between 1997 and 1999.