Climate: Somewhere Roger Corman is Laughing

Time once again to update The Warmlist of all the things caused by climate change, which is now nearly everything, including shrimp sex problems.

Here’s the latest from Science Daily this week:

King crabs threaten Antarctic ecosystem due to warming ocean

King crabs may soon become high-level predators in Antarctic marine ecosystems where they haven’t played a role in tens of millions of years, according to a new study led by Florida Institute of Technology.

“No Barrier to Emergence of Bathyal King Crabs on the Antarctic Shelf,” published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ties the reappearance of these crabs to global warming.

Lead author Richard Aronson, professor and head of Florida Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences, said the rising temperature of the ocean west of the Antarctic Peninsula — one of the most rapidly warming places on the planet — should make it possible for king crab populations to move to the shallow continental shelf from their current deep-sea habitat within the next several decades.

I dunno, sounds like we’ll have lots of cheap king crab in seafood stores before long.

Turns out, like most climate stories today, this has been reported before, back in 2011:

It’s like a scene out of a sci-fi movie — thousands, possibly millions, of king crabs are marching through icy, deep-sea waters and up the Antarctic slope.

“They are coming from the deep, somewhere between 6,000 to 9,000 feet down,” said James McClintock, Ph.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham Endowed Professor of Polar and Marine Biology.

Cue Corman, king of the B-movies: I propose a cross between Groundhog Day and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

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