Lovers of noshing on seafood might delight in the notion that higher carbon dioxide levels are creating larger crabs, but some researchers are snapping back at what they see as a dangerous development.
The pollution from carbon dioxide we're pumping out regularly thanks to factories, cars and just about everything else we humans can think to create, is filling the seas with enough chemicals that crabs are bulking up on the toxins and are actually becoming "more fearsome predators" than ever, it seems.
According to the Washington Post, the problem is that the same carbon dioxide pollution that has been making bigger crabs is also allowing these larger crabs to go after more oysters than before. This isn't good for those who love (or live off of the profits from) oysters, such as fisherman in the Chesapeake Bay area.
"Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster," marine geologist Justin Baker Ries said. Ries is a part of the University of North Carolina's Aquarium Research Center.
It's possible that carbon dioxide pollution that leads to the greater acidification of ocean waters will "supersize" crabs to such an extent over the next 75 to 100 years that they could feasibly "throw the food chain of the nation's largest estuary out of whack," due to their eating up more oysters and organisms than nature may have intended.
The carbon dioxide pollution creating larger and more ravenous crabs is a budgetary issue, too. Both Virginia and Maryland have been pumping as much revenue into rebuilding stocks of blue crabs and oysters alike in local waters, as the world itself has been pumping in the pollution that's making these fierce changes in the fragile ecosystem.
"Crabs put away carbon like nobody's business," the Washington Post says. "The more they eat, the faster they molt, a growth spurt during which their shells go soft. Carbon helps speed the process so that they emerge bigger and perhaps stronger, less vulnerable to predators and more formidable predators themselves."
The Post adds that those who might be ready for some supersized crabs to eat are going to be disappointed. The carbon dioxide pollution that is making the crabs bigger is really only affecting their shells, making them stronger and more vicious, but not necessarily bulkier in actual tasty flesh.
A study published in 2009, as relayed by the Post, showed that "Chesapeake blue crabs grew nearly four times faster in high-carbon tanks than in low-carbon tanks." Meanwhile, the same pollutants are making oysters more vulnerable.
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