Industrial pollution is Turning Canadian Lakes into ‘Jelly’

December 23, 2014- As lakes in Canada become more acidic due to pollution, they are increasingly dominated by jelly-like plankton, according to new research. The gummy invaders are throwing the delicate lakes ecosystem out of whack and could even disrupt the country's water supply. Over time the lakes have been pushed into a different ecological state.

Years of industrial pollution have replaced the calcium that should be in Canadian soil with acid. Over time, as the drainage areas that feed the country's lakes are leeched of their calcium, so are the lakes.
That's bad news for the calcium-rich plankton that used to thrive. Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that these plankton may be losing their turf to invaders less friendly to human needs.

Daphnia need calcium to build up their exoskeleton. Without it, they're more vulnerable to predators, and their populations have been dropping. Meanwhile, the researchers report, climate change has caused oxygen levels in the lakes to decline as well. This makes for higher populations of larval midges, which are Daphnia's main predators.

That's allowed the opportunistic Holopedium to jump in, and the study authors report that populations of these gelatinous plankton have exploded in the past few decades. They need much less calcium and are protected by their outer jelly capsules instead of by hard exoskeletons.

Researchers believe these plankton will continue to increase and could eventually clog up the extraction of drinking water.

Read the full washingtonpost.com post here.

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