Australia Study: Warming Ocean Leads to Possible Seaweed Extinction

The warming ocean climate is causing one-quarter of temperate seaweed species in Australia face extinction, a latest Australia study found on Saturday.

A team of Australian scientists, led by Assistant Professor Thomas Wernberg from The University of Western Australia's Ocean' s Institute, said temperate seaweed communities have changed over the past 50 years to the extent that they have become increasingly subtropical.

The researchers studied a database of more than 20,000 herbarium records of macro-algae collected in Australia since the 1940s, and found changes in seaweed communities in both the Indian and Pacific Oceans, consistent with rapid warming over the past decades.

"We found that continued warming might drive potentially hundreds of species towards the edge of the Australian continent beyond which there is no refuge," Assistant Professor Wernberg said in a statement on Saturday.

Although some species may be able to make some adjustments to cope with natural cooling and warming cycles, the researchers predicted that the rate and strength of warming in the coming decades is likely to force many retreating species further south and beyond the limits of available habitat.

Wernberg said seaweed act as "trees of the ocean," providing food, shelter and habitat for many other living things, and changes in the seaweed community could have cascading affects.

"The potential for global extinctions is concerning because one quarter of all macroalgal species in the world are found off Australia and these marine habitats support equally unique fish and invertebrate communities," he said.

The results was published in the latest edition of Current Biology.