Spotlight on Environmental Hypoxia and Aquatic Dead Zones
| Hypoxia can affect localized cells or tissues within an organism as well as larger areas within an ecosystem. For many years, researchers have been studying, tracking and predicting a known hypoxic region that appears each summer in the northern Gulf of Mexico (1). This hypoxic “dead zone” is the result of eutrophication, or excessive algae growth caused by nutrient runoff from the Mississippi river (2). These hypoxic conditions threaten the ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico, and have inspired research into the dead zones’ effects on various aquatic animal species (3,4). | ... |
