New paper: sea ice and food web structure in East Antarctica

After a long time in the making, I’m very pleased to announce that our paper about how changes of sea ice cover impacts food web structure just came out in Scientific Reports. While many polar regions currently lose sea ice quickly, some parts of East Antarctica recently saw a lot of it, even in summer. Here, we used stable isotopes of C, N and S to build models which show that absence of summer sea ice breakup deeply influences dominant consumers’ feeding habits. These results suggest that future changes of sea ice cover in Antarctica have the potential to cause drastic changes in food web structure, and therefore to impact benthic communities.

This research was made possible through funding by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO), in the framework of the vERSO and RECTO projects. It was also supported by the French Polar Institute (IPEV), through the REVOLTA program.

The paper is freely available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44605-5. Those enjoying a lighter read can have a look at ULiège’s news release about it.

[caption id="attachment_739” align="aligncenter” width="1502”] A graphical summary of observed changes in food web structure[/caption]