Zak
Legend
What are those blobby creatures that washed up on West Coast beaches?
The marine heat waves have had wide-ranging effects on the food web, likely impacting mammals and fish, a study found.
www.seattletimes.com
“They went from being zero — completely absent as far as anybody knows — to being one of the most abundant things in the entire ecosystem,” Gomes said.
According to the study, pyrosomes have been considered “trophic dead ends” since they have low energy content and most of them end up as detritus. It’s not clear how nutritious they are to the species who have consumed them in recent years, Gomes said, which means species further up the food chain, from the fish caught commercially to marine mammals, have likely been affected.
“That has an impact on the entire ecosystem … the pyrosome is consuming energy that normally would have gone through multiple prey to eventually end up in a salmon,” he said.