While allowing my holiday meal(s) to digest, I browsed my Favorites Library and deleted a couple years of news items. I recalled my pleasure at THIS one, because I love crabmeat, and not the stringy shreds known as Snow Crab that you buy in the canned-fish aisle of the Pig Out Supermarket for $89 for a 4 oz can.
Owing to global warming in Antarctica, which (see the link) is apparently harmless to penquins, whales and fish, predators like crabs and sharks are sneaking back into Antarctic waters for a "Smorgasbord" of the hapless bottom dwellers that have flourished there since crabs and sharks were chased away by the cold 40 million years ago.
King Crabs, especially, hate the cold. Magnesium dispersion is difficult for a crab in cold water. He gets high, probably wears a periwinkle shell on his head, then drops deader than a Democrat's conscience. But warm water produces a perfectly healthy, sober crab with a day-tripper to an Antarctic buffet.
And sharks have their own problems with cold water. One is chemical, which bears a damaging relationship to water temperature (cold is bad); another is that sharks need to move, move, move, which is hard to do in cold water. (I question this, because a large shark enthusiastically nudged my leg in 56 F shallow water off the coast of Maine once, then hung around for a while. He seemed perfectly happy).
In any case, when Antarctica warms up, sharks and crabs will chow down like Goomba and DC on a budget Carnival Cruise. When those two blitzkreig the shrimp mounds, beware of undertow and tail shrapnel.
But Confusion reigns! A third specimen of famished shark, the Spiney Dogfish, is the subject of much confusion by the fishologists who study these things. According to the link, the "virtually global" Dogfish will be the scourge of Antarctica when the water warms, but an imbedded link in the same article states that they're disappearing and endangered...and add to this befuddlement this: the lack of ice will allow the Orcas to massacre the Spiney Doggish. You decide, because the "science" can't. My pet Spiney Dogfish won't answer my questions, either. As for the King Crabs, sharks eat them too...but, so what?
Finally, someone tell me why Antarctica has been free of sharks and King Crabs for 40 million years. Warming and cooling is cyclical..right?
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