A Big Climate Warning from One of the Gulf of Maine’s Smallest Marine Creatures

INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS • February 20, 2022

Given the rate at which the waters in the Gulf of Maine are heating up, Mainers may need to swap out the lobsters on their license plates for squid. All of New England could issue new specialty plates featuring creatures threatened by the speed climate change is slamming the gulf: a critically endangered right whale, a cute puffin or a vanishing cod. For all the escalating climate-related threats to iconic and commercially valuable marine life in the Gulf of Maine, though, scientists say there is one creature we should especially keep our eye on—a barely visible creature that helps those whales, puffins and cod survive: the zooplankton Calanus finmarchicus.