Photos Baikal Seal
The team also found that phytoplankton had increased by about threefold, and they tracked a similar tripling of one type of zooplankton in the lake. Plankton form the base of the food web in the lake, so changes to these populations may affect organisms higher up the food chain, many of which are endemic only to Lake Baikal. The lake's 25-million-year history has made it the most biologically diverse lake on the planet, Hampton said, with more than half of animals and 30 percent of plants not found anywhere else. "Something like 40 percent of the species in Baikal may not have been described yet," Hampton added. The lake hosts the world's only freshwater seal, the Baikal seal, which rears its pups in ice caves on the frozen lake. Sponge forests -- rare for lakes -- grow beneath the surface. "It's like a freshwater Galapagos," Hampton said. "Even an enormous lake like Baikal looks like it is being affected by climate change," said John Smol of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, who was not a part of the study. "It just shows you how pervasive climate change is going to be." "It's a human story of incredible dedication," Smol added. "It was a family of three generations that had the vision and understanding to see that this is worth doing. A fundamental lesson here is the power of long-term monitoring data. You get very little credit for it." Kozhov certainly would not have foreseen what it would be used for in 2008. "No one was even thinking climate change in the 1940s," Smol said. "But you can mine the data after the fact." Related Links: Jessica Marshall's Blog: EnvironMental Case |
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