http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/2013/04/07/a0c29f48-972f-11e2-b68f-dc5c4b47e519_story_1.html
It is the dawn of the super crab.Crabs are bulking up on carbon pollution that pours out of power plants, factories and vehicles and settles in the oceans, turning the tough crustaceans into even more fearsome predators.
i don't eat seafood i have friends who do they say they run from $70. to $100. a bushel, if they are bigger the price i'm sure will go up drastically.
That presents a major problem for the Chesapeake Bay, where crabs eat oysters. In a life-isn’t-fair twist, the same carbon that crabs absorb to grow bigger stymies the development of oysters.
“Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster,” Justin Baker Ries, a marine geologist at the University of North Carolina’s Aquarium Research Center, said in an recent interview.
these types of studies should not be ceremoniously dismissed and those who at them look at it as more crab for the buck.
Over the next 75 to 100 years, ocean acidification could supersize blue crabs, which may then eat more oysters and other organisms and possibly throw the food chain of the nation’s largest estuary out of whack.That would undermine an effort to rebuild the stocks of both creatures. Virginia and Maryland are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into rebuilding the populations of blue crabs and oysters to some semblance of their historical numbers.The problem extends beyond crabs and the Chesapeake Bay. Lobsters and shrimp also are bulking up on carbon dioxide along the Atlantic coast. Like oysters, coral that helps protect small organisms from big predators is being adversely affected by higher acidity in the waters.Crabs put away carbon like nobody’s business. The more they eat, the faster they molt, a growth spurt during which their shells go soft. Carbon helps speed the process so that they emerge bigger and perhaps stronger, less vulnerable to predators and more formidable predators themselves.
this is beginning to sound more lik a twilight zone episode,
At UNC, marine geologists are analyzing video of the slaughter that took place when they put mud crabs and oysters in tanks they intentionally polluted with carbon over three months for a 2011 study.It was like watching lions tear apart lambs. The crabs scurried from their side of the tanks, banged on the shells of the traumatized oysters, pried them open with a claw in a way similar to what humans do with a knife at restaurants and gobbled them down.For crab lovers, bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Carbon-absorbing crabs put all their energy into upgrading shells, not flesh — like a mansion without much furniture. So diners might be disappointed years from now when they crack open huge crabs and find little meat.
crab lovers do yourself a favor and read th rest of this article, i saw no threat from test that says they can harm you but what is the point of verification of that as true? plus higher price for less meat might not sit well even with avid lovers.
