Climate Fact: Nematode Response to Water Temperature
Ranging in size from barely visible to nearly 30 feet long, nematodes, or roundworms, are the most abundant animals on Earth. Because they comprise 90 percent of all life on the seafloor, changes in their abundance and diversity can have major implications for ocean ecosystems. Between 1992 and 1994 in the deep waters of the Cretan Sea in the eastern Mediterranean, an ocean current anomaly caused a 0.72 degree Fahrenheit plummet of bottom water temperatures. As this happened, there was a doubling of the total number of nematode species living on the bottom of the Cretan Sea, which was largely due to Atlantic nematode species coming into the Mediterranean from the north. The absolute nematode abundance, however, dropped by as much as 65 percent. As the waters began to warm after 1994, nematode abundance began to recover, but the number of nematode species began to decline.
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Source: Danovaro, R et al. “Biodiversity response to climate change in a warm deep sea.” Ecology Letters 7 (2004): 821-828.
