My name is Ophelia and I am a little oyster who lives in Fanny Bay on Vancouver Island. I live with my Mom Opal, my Dad Otis, and my older brother Oscar. We have a cozy home in a nice warm sand pit on the ocean floor. We oysters’ are filter feeders, each morning we wake up and go to work, filtering water through our gills. This is a very important job as we are removing pollutants from the water. We are a tough species and are able to handle these pollutants, however; when temperatures are too high we can’t protect ourselves from the pollutants. Just like when you are outside in the winter without a coat and it is cold outside, your body has a harder time protecting you from the cold. Lately the temperature of the water surrounding my home has been too high and many of us oysters are getting sick. When we are sick we can’t go to work and filter-feed, just like you can’t go to school.
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| Live Oysters on the Coast! |
The answer is global warming! Whenever people drive a car, use the dishwasher, or even leave the lights on, a gas called carbon dioxide is released into the air. Carbon dioxide traps light from the sun in our atmosphere. Like when a car is parked outside in the summer, and sunlight shines through into the windows, the car heats up because the sunlight cannot get out. So that tells us how global warming heats up the earth but what about the ocean? Well if there was a glass of water in the parked car it would heat up too, not just the air in the car. The ocean is like the glass of water and the earth’s atmosphere is like the car. When the atmosphere heats up so will the ocean. So how can you help me and my oyster family and friends from getting sick and missing filter-feeder school and work? Try walking or taking the bus to school. Remember to always have a buddy when walking to school though. This will help to reduce the carbon dioxide released by cars. I love going to my filter-feeder school and learning how to filter pollutants, I get to play with all my friends! Lets work together to reduce carbon dioxide in the air and make sure this can happen.
Stay tuned for next week; you will get to meet my friend Dakota Duck.
Full Article on Oysters and Global Warming
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1010-aps.html
Learn About Oysters on the Coast
http://www.everythingcoastal.com/2010/09/r-is-for-oysters.html
Ophelia, I have a question, when you get sick, is it bad for humans to eat you?
ReplyDeleteArielle great question!! It's true that when us oysters are sick we hold our poison in our shells and if humans eat us they can get sick to!!
ReplyDeleteThe rule is that months with an "R" are good to eat us shell fish! And months without an R are too warm, and we probably can't filter the poisons properly.