The Changing Seasonality of the Sea

Rebecca Asch, PhD

Transcript

Hi my name is Rebecca Asch I'm a recent graduate of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Scripts is part the University of California San Diego

I'm also proud to say that I'm an Nancy Foster Scholar

I study how climate change affects seasonality in oceans on land we know that warming temperatures mean that flowers are blooming earlier in the spring and that migration of many animals such as birds and butterflies are also occurring earlier however what's happening in the ocean do we see similar changes there?

This is the question I'm trying to answer.

I study an area of science called phenology.

Phenology refers to seasonal biological cycles and how they're affected by weather and climate more specifically I study the phenology a fish and plankton in the Southern California current.

In this region and many regions of the ocean fish time when they spawn to the abundant plankton so often there's a seasonal increase in plankton spring and fish time there spawning to this event so that there's abundant plankton for larval fish to eat.

However these events don't always occur exactly at the same time.

The fish might spawn late or early compared to the plankton and when this happens larvae may starve or they may grow more slowly than usual.

This will mean that there's fewer larvae that grow into adults and then in later years there's fewer fish for us to catch and fewer fish for seafood lovers to enjoy.

I think studying this using data from the CalCOFI program.

CalCOFI stands for the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Program and CalCOFI has been monitoring the abundance of larval fish as well as oceanic conditions since the year 1951.

Its one of the oldest and most comprehensive programs up its type as a result its allowing me to examine how climate change is impacting spawning times what aspects a climate system influence the phenology a fish