Scientists document fragile land-sea ecological chain

Rob Jordan in the Stanford University News: Douglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles did not set out to discover one of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented. But that's exactly what they and a team of researchers – all current or former Stanford students and faculty – did in a new study published in Scientific Reports.

Their findings shed light on how human disturbance of the natural world may lead to widespread, yet largely invisible, disruptions of ecological interaction chains. This, in turn, highlights the need to build non-traditional alliances – among marine biologists and foresters, for example – to address whole ecosystems across political boundaries.

...Through analysis of nitrogen isotopes, animal tracking and field surveys, the researchers showed that replacing native trees with non-native palms led to about five times fewer roosting seabirds (they seemed to dislike palms' simple and easily wind-swayed canopies), which led to fewer bird droppings to fertilize the soil below, fewer nutrients washing into surrounding waters, smaller and fewer plankton in the water and fewer hungry manta rays cruising the coastline.

"This is an incredible cascade," said researcher Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of environmental science and senior fellow with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "As an ecologist, I am worried about the extinction of ecological processes. This dramatically illustrates the significance of such extinctions."...

A manta ray, shot by Agsftw, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license