This is one of the few reports that clearly state that Diatoms have declined and other phytoplankton have increased.

http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/3189

Shift in Arabian Sea Plankton May Threaten Fisheries

Growing "Dead Zone" Could Short-Circuit Food Chain

2014-09-09

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A growing "dead zone" in the middle of the Arabian Sea has allowed plankton uniquely suited to low- oxygen water to take over the base of the food chain. Their rise to dominance over the last decade could be disastrous for the predator fish that sustain 120 million people living on the sea's edge.

The rise of Noctiluca scintillans at the base of the Arabian Sea food chain threatens fisheries in Oman and other countries bordering the sea. (Joaquim Goes)

Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and their colleagues are the first to document the rapid rise of green Noctiluca scintillans, an unusual dinoflagellate that eats other plankton and draws energy from the sun via microscopic algae living within its cells. Noctiluca's thick blooms color the Arabian Sea an emerald green each winter, from the shores of Oman on the west, to India and Pakistan on the east.

In a study published this week in Nature Communications, the researchers show how the millions of green algae living within Noctiluca's cells allow it to exploit an oxygen-starved dead zone the size of Texas. They hypothesize that a tide of nutrient-rich sewage flowing from booming cities on the Arabian Sea is expanding the dead zone and feeding Noctiluca's growth.

"These blooms are massive, appear year after year, and could be devastating to the Arabian Sea ecosystem over the long-term," said the study's lead author, Helga do Rosario Gomes, a biogeochemist at Lamont-Doherty.

Winter blooms of Noctiluca are so vast they can be seen from space. (Norman Kuring, NASA)

Until recently, photosynthetic diatoms supported the Arabian Sea food chain. Zooplankton grazed on the diatoms, a type of algae, and were in turn eaten by fish. In the early 2000s, it all changed. The researchers began to see vast blooms ofNoctiluca and a steep drop in diatoms and dissolved oxygen in the water column. Within a decade, Noctiluca had virtually replaced diatoms at the base of the food chain, marking the start of a colossal ecosystem shift.

Green Noctiluca lives in the tropics while its close relative, red Noctiluca scintillans, whose blooms can sometimes kill fish with their high ammonia content, prefers temperate waters. Green Noctiluca is remarkably willing to eat anything. It feeds on other plankton, living or dead, flushing diatoms and other plankton into its gullet with a flick of its flagellum. It also draws energy from the millions of green algae, or "endosymbionts," living within its transparent cell walls. The algae fix carbon from sunlight and pass the energy, like rent, on to their host.

A varied diet gives Noctiluca its edge. "They can swim down to find nutrients, up to find light, and they can eat other small organisms," said Sharon Smith, a plankton ecologist at the University of Miami who works in the Arabian Sea but was not involved in the study.

To understand the key to Noctiluca's success, the researchers spent three successive winters aboard the Indian research ship Sagar Sampada, starting in 2009. Sailing off the coast of Goa, they sampled blooms and performed experiments. Putting Noctilucaand itsdiatom competitors in oxygen-starved water they found that Noctiluca's carbon-fixation rate rose by up to 300 percent while the diatoms' fell by nearly as much. They also found Noctiluca grew faster in light than in dark, thanks to its sun-loving endosymbiont-algae, which are thought to have evolved 1.3 billion years ago on an oxygen-scarce Earth.

The researchers tried to also identify Noctiluca's predators. They had heard reports of Omani fishermen seeing more gelatinous salps, jellyfish and sea turtles. Could they be eating the Noctiluca? Scooping up several salps from the sea, the researchers dropped them into buckets of seawater thick with Noctiluca blooms. In an hour, the water became visibly clearer. By measuring the drop in chlorophyll, the researchers estimated that one salp can polish off about two-thirds of a bucket of Noctiluca in an hour.  

"They chowed on Noctiluca, like rabbits in a lettuce patch," said Gomes. "This is a creature that few other marine animals want to eat."

Noctiluca is too big for the crustacean grazers that normally feed on diatoms, leading to concerns that it could spawn an alternate food chain lacking the predator fish people like to eat.  Many fisheries in the Arabian Sea are already on a slow decline. Eighty-five percent of fishermen surveyed in the fishing-dependent states of Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra in India reported a smaller catch from 20 years and 12 years earlier, according to a 2014 study in the journal Oryx. Similarly, a rise in puffer fish off the coast of the Indian state of Kerala has been attributed to a crash in predator cobia fish since 2007, according to a 2013 study in Current Science. In Oman, the catch of large fish fell 18 percent in 2013 from the year before, the Times of Oman reported.

When Noctiluca isn't feasting on plankton, it grabs free energy from the millions of green algae living within its cells. (Joaquim Goes)

Whether Noctiluca or overfishing is to blame, one major factor stands out: massive sewage flows into the Arabian Sea as the coastal population has exploded. As the study authors point out, Mumbai's population has doubled to 21 million in the last decade. The region now sends 63 tons of nitrogen and 11 tons of phosphorus into the Arabian Sea each day. Karachi's 15 million people send 70 percent of their wastewater into the sea untreated. Much of the fertilizer used to boost yields on farms in South Asia also eventually washes into rivers that drain into the sea.

"All of these cities are growing so rapidly they don't have the capacity to treat their sewage," said study coauthor Joaquim Goes, a biogeochemist at Lamont-Doherty. "The amount of material being discharged is humongous."

From the Gulf of Mexico to Chesapeake Bay, dead zones and degraded fisheries are on the rise globally. Doubling in size each decade, and now covering more than 95,000 square miles, they are "probably a key stressor on marine ecosystems," according toa 2008 study in Science. Shifting ocean currents due to climate change can make the problem worse by dredging up nutrients from the ocean bottom.

The Arabian Sea fishery may already be in decline. In Goa, India, women sort through the morning catch. (Joaquim Goes)

In the Arabian Sea, stronger summer monsoon winds have boosted algae growth by bringing more nutrients from the deep ocean to the surface. In a2005 study in Science, Goes, Gomes and colleagues showed that biomass from summer blooms off Somalia, Yemen and Oman, jumped nearly 350 percent between 1997 and 2004. They hypothesize that receding snow cover in the Himalaya-Tibetan plateau is making the Indian subcontinent hotter in summer compared to the Arabian Sea, strengthening the winds that blow toward India, bringing up more nutrients off Somalia, Yemen and Oman.

The researchers expected gentler monsoon winds in winter, as the process reversed itself, leading to fewer algae blooms. But NASA satellite maps showed just the opposite: more winter blooms. After several years of sampling what they thought were sporadic Noctiluca blooms, the researchers realized in 2006 that the blooms seen from space were not diatoms but recurring Noctiluca blooms.

They wondered if falling oxygen levels could explain the diatom-to-Noctiluca shift. Sure enough, the experiments aboard theSagar Sampada seemed toconfirm their hypothesis.

The study has attributed much of Noctiluca's rise to growing sewage flows into the Arabian Sea, an intriguing connection that should be followed up on, says Andrew Juhl, a microbiologist at Lamont-Doherty who was not involved in the study. "It's unusual for Noctiluca to bloom in the open sea and return year after year," he said "All of these observations suggest that something dramatic has changed in the Arabian Sea."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Indian Space Research Organization and India's Council of Industrial Research. Other authors: Prabhu Matondkar, National Institute of Oceanography in Goa; Edward Buskey, University of Texas at Austin; Subhajit Basu, Goa University; Sushma Parab, Kent State University and Prasad Thoppil, Stennis Space Center.

Diatom and Fish

A few papers on Diatoms and Fish

The Dependence of the Fishes on the Diatoms
Albert Mann.
Ecology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Apr., 1921), pp. 79-83
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1928919

“No diatoms, no hake”

"There is no better illustration in science of the practical value of ecology than is afforded by the diatoms. The economic importance they are now [1921] seen to have might have been understood fifty years earlier [i.e, 1871] and some use might have been made of their value during that period of time, if the inter-relation of these remarkable plants with other forms of aquatic life had been prominent in the minds of investigators. As it is, they remained for many years little more than the playthings of microscopists, prized and wondered over because of their astonishing beauty, collected at great expense by enthusiastic amateurs, and illustrated in costly books, which may be searched through in vain for any hint of their worth outside of that belonging to their symmetry of form and striking loveliness of design."

[ for the past 90 / 140 years Diatoms have been badly neglected, we are trying to remedy the situation.]

http://www.princeton.edu/~mhiscock/BarberHiscock2006.pdf
A rising tide lifts all phytoplankton: Growth response of other phytoplankton taxa in diatom-dominated blooms.
R. T. Barber and M. R. Hiscock

"4. Diatom Response

It has commanded much attention because of the well-established relationship between diatom blooms and fish production [Iverson, 1990], which led Bostwick Ketchum to revise Isaiah 40:6 this way,

‘‘All fish is diatom.’’

[Isaiah 40:6 - A voice says, "Cry out." And I said, "What shall I cry?"
"All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.]

http://bayviewcompass.com/archives/960
Flood of ‘08 served up feast for fish

“Compared to other phytoplankton, diatoms are like juicy steaks,” said Aguilar, who has been studying Lake Michigan’s diatoms and other phytoplankton for over a decade.

http://www.smsi.org/publications/mn4803-5.shtml
One may almost say no diatoms , no oysters. Some curious observations have been made in this respect. Mr. Bartholomew reports that the Menhaden (a surface feeding fish of the herring family) is quite a consumer of diatoms. He writes as follows: "You will probably be astonished to know that a 200 millimeter beaker of Menhaden intestines will frequently yield, after cleaning 25 millimeter of diatoms. Years ago, I thought I was a collector but my hat is off to the Menhaden."

http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt9c6006rh;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e312&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere

Sardines above 100 mm. feed primarily on diatoms, though copepods are at times prevalent. Among the adult sardines of 200 mm. or longer the food is mainly diatoms, and occasionally dinoflagellates or schizopods occur in major numbers.

http://www.fbbva.es/TLFU/dat/02SMETACEKSEPARATA.pdf
Dr Victor Smetacek, he was the Chief Scientific Officer of LOHAFEX, the 13th Iron Fertilization experiment conducted in 2009

Diatoms - Krill - Whales; "the food chain of the giants."

Groundfish overfishing, diatom decline, and the marine silica cycle : lessons from Saanich Inlet, Canada, and the Baltic Sea cod crash

In this study, we link groundfish activity to the marine silica cycle and suggest that the drastic mid-1980s crash of the Baltic Sea cod (Gadus morhua) population triggered a cascade of events leading to decrease in dissolved silica (DSi) and diatom abundance in the water. We suggest that this seemingly unrelated sequence of events was caused by a marked decline in sediment resuspension associated with reduced groundfish activity resulting from the cod crash. In a study in Saanich Inlet, British Columbia, Canada, we discovered that, by resuspending bottom sediments, groundfish triple DSi fluxes from the sediments and reduce silica accumulation therein. Using these findings and the available oceanographic and environmental data from the Baltic Sea, we estimate that overfishing and recruitment failure of Baltic cod reduced by 20% the DSi supply from bottom sediments to the surface water leading to a decline in the diatom population in the Baltic Sea. The major importance of the marginal ocean in the marine silica cycle and the associated high population density of groundfish suggest that groundfish play a major role in the silica cycle. We postulate that dwindling groundfish populations caused by anthropogenic perturbations, e.g., overfishing and bottom water anoxia, may cause shifts in marine phytoplankton communities.

Authors : Katz, Timor; Yahel, Gitai; Yahel, Ruthy; Tunnicliffe, Verena; Herut, Barak; Snelgrove, Paul; Crusius, John; Lazar, Boaz

https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/handle/1912/3697

Diatoms by Richard Henkels

http://www.science20.com/news_releases/mighty_diatom_weighs_climate_change?nocache=1

The diatom is the most vital organism on the planet for it feeds the oceans and as it sequesters carbon through photosynthesis it gives off the critical core of the 60% of the earth's oxygen (the percentage attributed to the oceans.
Even more, where this oxygen would most logically be carried over land one finds the principal rains that water the core of the crops produced by the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere.
In any case the triangular North Pacific would, most logically, pinch water movement into place and the S-shaped Atlantic lift.
The fact that the South Atlantic draws water from both the Indian and the South Pacific (around Cape Horn) when it should be slipping with the wind, makes this [Cape Horn] the roughest of waters on earth (due to the Atlantic's lifting).
As this foreign (trans-equatorial) jet enters the North Atlantic it draws the seed diatoms from the area around the Sargasso and at its convectional bend, southeast of George's Bank (a shoal documented as the primary reproductive section of the North Atlantic for fish) the sinking Gulf Stream creates great eddies known as Gulf Rings that carry seed diatoms on an arching path towards George's Bank in the same season the precise food for the triggering of the diatom bloom should be surfacing at Cape Cod (a deposit of silica) to be swept off shore to meet and be inhaled by the watery tornado-like Rings.
Most all the newly hatched fish (and shellfish) of George's Bank from cod, to flounder, to hake and herring depend for survival upon the diatom.
If one adult cod lays between 4 million and 7 million eggs and the two dozen other species that spawn here also depend upon diatoms. . . have the fish stocks in the North Atlantic have declining over the past 70 years been cause primarily by over-fishing as most everyone believes, or could it have to do with the extreme erosion of Cape Cod and Nantucket? It is my belief that this erosion has been mistakenly blamed on winter storms that sweep up this coast known as "Northeasters."
The truth is that the Labrador Current, the richest of cold water veins, is being ruptured. Without silica in this current, the Cape and Nantucket erode and the diatom bloom as a geometric progression, is being chopped before it begins.
Without diatoms, the newly hatched starve soon after taking life.
With a greatly reduced diatom count in the North Atlantic the fishing grounds from the Grand Banks, to the southern tip of Greenland, to the southern tip of Iceland, the British Isles, North Sea and even the North Pacific fed via the Bering Strait and Bering Sea. As this rich super-cooled flow passes out on the floor of the Bering Sea it creates the Alaskan "King" Crab (proof of this rich food).
Where the oxygen produced by the bloom would most logically be carried over land one finds the rains over the British Isles (that then drift over Northern Europe). Where it surfaces in the Northeastern Pacific it creates the nearly constant rains of the Pacific Northwest and Canadian West that then drift over North America (watering the farmlands of the Midwest, "breadbasket of thew world".
This means the rupture of the vein that triggers the diatom bloom is reducing fish stocks in the two most productive oceans on the planet.
If one were to repair this mechanism it would generate over a trillion dollars of revenue for the United Sates and the same for the rest of the world.
By repair the Bloom one could turn vast areas of these oceans into carbon dioxide-absorbing, oxygen emitting surfaces.

Richard Henkels

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080111151504.htm

Greenhouse Ocean May Downsize Fish, Risking One Of World's Most Productive Fisheries

...

The Bering Sea is highly productive thanks mainly to diatoms, a large type of phytoplankton. "Because they're large, diatoms are eaten by large zooplankton, which are then eaten by large fish," Hutchins explained.

The scientists found that greenhouse conditions favored smaller types of phytoplankton over diatoms. Such a shift would ripple up the food chain: as diatoms become scarce, animals that eat diatoms would become scarce, and so forth.

"The food chain seems to be changing in a way that is not supporting these top predators, of which, of course, we're the biggest," Hutchins said.

...

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/article493716.ece

Fish as brain food helped homo become sapiens?

What gave rise to the rapid brain size increase that made us ‘thinking' men? The answer: we began eating fish

One of the puzzles in biology is how rapid the human brain developed.

It took hardly a million or so years for us to become the “thinking man” or homo sapiensfrom our immediate ancestors and cousins, the homo habilis, erectusorrudolfensis. How do we know this?

From a comparison of the brain to body ratio. While the other homoshad a brain volume of 600-800 ml (based on skull size), we have about 1250 ml, and all for roughly the same body size.

Thus, we have far more within our head than our immediate ancestors or the chimpanzees (brain about 410 ml).

...

RECENT PAPER

A recent paper by Dr. David Braun and colleagues in the June 1, 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, reports on the historical evidence of a large collection of fish bones near a putative settlement of homo, dated to about 1.95 million years ago, in the Rift Valley of Africa. This is the area from where we humans are thought to have originated.

And the fish bones they found had bite marks matching those of human (and not great ape) teeth.

Why is this paper important? For this, may I refer you to an excellent review article by Drs. C L Broadhurst, S.C. Cunnane and M A Crawford that appeared 12 years ago in the British Journal of Nutrition (1998; 79:3-21), a review that reminds us of the logic of Sherlock Holmes?

...

Also note that fish contain those vital nutrients that the brain needs in order to develop and grow. The human brain is “oily”, containing as much as 600g of lipid per kg, with long chain fatty acids like arachidonic acid (AA) docosa-hexenoic acid (DHA), that the body does not produce; they are thus “essential nutrients” – and fish have them in good measure.

So then, where do vegetarians get their essential lipids from?

From green vegetables, walnuts and peanuts, sesame and mustard, cotton, sunflower and other oil sources. And this is why modern-day nutritionists insist on our intake of poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), rather then Dalda or trans-fats.

NOT THE TYPE

Note too that meat (pork, beef, chicken and such) is muscle or protein-rich. The fat content meat has is not the type that feeds the brain. It is, as my granddaughter Kimaya says, “body food” while nuts, fish or greens are “brain food”. Thus in having chanced upon eating fish, homos had struck the jackpot, in comparison to the largely veggie primates or the carnivorous animals in the neighborhood.

...

dbala@lvpei.org

Diatoms, Primary Productivity, Fish

The Dynamics of a Diatom Bloom

J. H. Ryther, C. S. Yentsch, E. M. Hulburt and R. F. Vaccaro

Biological Bulletin, Vol. 115, No. 2 (Oct., 1958), pp. 257-268
Published by: Marine Biological Laboratory
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1539030


Photosynthesis and Fish Production in the Sea
http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/~davey/Geog158/Readings/RytherScience1969.pdf

The production of organic matter and its conversion to higher forms of life vary throughout the world ocean.

John H. Ryther
Science, VOL. 166, 3 October 1969

The result has been modification of the estimate of primary production in the
world ocean from 1.2 to 1.5 x 10 * 10 tons of carbon fixed per year (5) to a new
figure, 1.5 to 1.8 x 10 * 10 tons (18 billion tons).

Attempts have also been made by Steemann Nielsen and Jensen (5), Ryther (8), and Koblentz-Mishke et al. (7) to assign specific levels or ranges of productivity to different parts of the ocean. Although the approach was somewhat different in each case, in general the agreement between the three was good and, with appropriate condensation and combination, permit the following conclusions.

1) Annual primary production in the open sea varies, for the most part, between
25 and 75 grams of carbon fixed per square meter and averages about 50 grams of carbon per square meter per year. This is true for roughly 90 percent of the ocean, an area of 326 x 106 square kilometers.

Overfishing are there really plenty of fish in the sea

Overfishing: Are there really plenty of fish in the sea?

Decades of overfishing sent many U.S. fisheries into free fall last century. Can a new focus on sustainability save fish and fishermen from going extinct?

By Russell McLendon

Tue, Oct 06 2009 at 11:30 AM EST


"Worldwide fishing catches grew 400 percent between 1950 and 1994, following centuries of increasingly intensive commercial fishing, but it couldn't last forever — big fisheries began crashing by the late 20th century, and global production leveled off in 1988. U.S. catches peaked six years later at 5.2 million tons, more than double the country's 1950 total, and by 2008 they had fallen back down to 4.1 million, despite rising demand."

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/overfishing-are-there-really-plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea

Declining fish population

http://www.cooltribe.com/video/the-end-of-the-line-trailer

The End of the Line Trailer

"The End of the Line is a powerful film about one of the world's most disturbing problems - over-fishing. Advances in fishing technology mean whole species of wild fish are under threat."

Dwindling fish catches

http://www.hindu.com/2009/03/11/stories/2009031154321000.htm

Dwindling catches

Ocean temperature is one of the primary environmental factors that determine the geographic range of a species. A paper published recently in the journal Fish and Fisheries has used computer modelling to project the global impact of climate change on biodiversity with reference to 1,000-odd fish species. The study has shown that the only way for the tropical fish, with their inability to regulate their body temperature, to survive in warming oceans would be to migrate to cooler waters at higher latitudes. The warming of the oceans would affect the sub-polar species differently. A two-to-four-fold limit to temperature tolerance compared to tropical species and a very limited species diversity would have a big impact in the polar regions. Local extinctions in the sub-polar, tropical, and semi-enclosed regions as well as migration of species to cooler latitudes would affect nearly 60 per cent of present fish biodiversity. Such a mass-scale disturbance is very likely to disrupt the marine ecosystem. Though warming oceans would affect fish whether they live at the surface level or at depths, the shift to an extent of 600-odd km would be seen in the case of surface-living species.

Local extinctions in the tropics will have a great effect on food security of developing countries. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the direct impact of climate change on fisheries would be more pronounced in the developing and least developed countries where about 42 million people work directly in the sector. Two-thirds of the most vulnerable countries are in tropical Africa. It is a fact that reliance on fish protein is directly related to the level of development. In the developing countries, 2.8 billion people depend on fish products for 20 per cent of animal protein. The only way to reduce the magnitude of the impact is to take urgent measures to check the current trend of carbon pollution and limit the average global temperature rise to 2 degrees C by 2100, as against the anticipated 6 degrees. Dwindling fish catch will be one of the many adverse consequences of uncontrolled global warming. Several studies published since the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s 4th Assessment Report show that carbon emissions are rising faster than expected, and worldwide action to bring them down brooks no delay.

------------------------
Nualgi can increase fish yield and help absorb large amounts of CO2

Where is the missing carbon?

More fish can mean more carbon capture.
Please see the following article.

http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/fish-guts-carbon-sink?

Where is the missing carbon?
Tim Varga | February 17, 2009
Research suggests that a lot of it may wind up inside fish


A giant hole in the global carbon budget may be plugged by an unlikely source: fish guts.

A large proportion of manmade CO2 emissions drain back out of the atmosphere into various carbon sinks. Scientists have long known that approximately half the CO2 flux from the atmosphere goes to land-based sinks and half to the ocean. The problem is that the math hasn’t quite added up.

Terrestrial sinks like forests and savannas, in addition to the long-term storage in soils, are relatively well quantified. Primary absorption in the oceans, too, has been fairly well described: satellite imagery of the open ocean has been used to map and calculate the amount of primary absorption across 70% of the earth’s surface.

Still, the numbers contain a substantial gap. Since the terrestrial sinks are comparatively better understood, and the CO2 in the atmosphere has to go somewhere, most scientists assumed that it was somehow ending up in the ocean. But where?

Almost twenty years ago, researchers at the University of Miami discovered that a species of toadfish carries tiny balls of calcite (CaCO3) in its gut. The authors suggested that this was likely a result of a filtration system in the fish’s stomach: water breathed in and out by the fish would need to be cleaned of various salts, including calcium and magnesium, to maintain proper salinity. These salts combine with carbon in seawater to form carbonates, which precipitate and collect in the fish’s gut.

It turns out that toadfish aren’t unique. All bony fishes have this feature. A new study calculates that these tiny calcite stones could be a missing sink that accounts for 3-15% of the oceanic carbon absorption. That’s a big hole to plug, and the study’s figures are conservative. The actual number could be significantly higher.

This provides another reason to be concerned with declining fish stocks worldwide. In addition to missing out on your favorite tuna sandwich, the global fisheries collapse could end a vital sink for atmospheric carbon.

* * * * * *

Use of Nualgi will result in more fish.
So it could contribute substantially to reducing global warming.