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THE food webs of ocean species are so varied that predicting the effect of climate change on marine ecology has seemed nigh-on impossible. Now Mary O’Connor and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, may have solved the problem. They found that plankton, the basis of marine food webs, might react to warming in a predictable way.

When the team warmed tanks of seawater, they found phytoplankton grew slightly faster with every degree of temperature rise. But zooplankton grew – and ate the phytoplankton – faster still. As zooplankton only retain about 10 per cent of the biomass of phytoplankton they eat, there was a fall in biomass overall ().

This might not be bad news for people. More zooplankton means more food for fish, and so more fish, though such top-heavy food webs could crash, O’Connor warns.