Warming oceans reshape plankton, potentially leaving fish with less nutritious food

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The world is changing. As humans, we tend to focus on what happens on land, but the planet's food systems depend on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

Across the globe, ecosystems are undergoing significant change. "Two groups of plankton form the foundation of the marine food web, and they are so closely linked that a change in one can be profoundly felt by the other. As the ocean warms, both are changing.

My research asks how they are changing, in terms of which species are present and how their abundance shifts over time, and what that means for the rest of the food web. If our hypothesis is correct, fish may be getting not only less food but food of lower quality," says researcher Lauriane Ribas-Deulofeu at Nord University. A single plankton sample contains thousands of individuals, and working through a season's samples under a microscope takes months.

Ribas-Deulofeu uses AI to classify and measure them instead. The gain is not only speed: It lets scientists monitor more sites more often and can get the results to environmental managers and policymakers in near real time rather than years later. "I have thousands of images that need to be analyzed and classified.

AI can help with this process, but first I had to train the system to recognize the different organisms. That has required numerous hours of work because distinguishing between the groups is not always easy," she says. The two main groups of plankton are phytoplankton and zooplankton.

Phytoplankton are microscopic, single-celled organisms, such as green algae or cyanobacteria, that drift in the water, using sunlight to produce their own energy through photosynthesis. Zooplankton are microscopic animal-like organisms that feed on phytoplankton and other tiny organisms. Together, they form the foundation of marine and freshwater food webs.