life in the ocean is a little different than it is up here for one thing water holds onto heat a lot better than air so temperatures tend to stay the same from day to day rather than fluctuating with the sun but this does not mean that ocean dwelling organisms are less susceptible to rising temperatures brought about by the climate crisis in fact most marine critters are adapted to live at a very narrow temperature range so even a tiny change can quickly spell trouble and we might not have understood just how much trouble without the help of an unassuming little snail the three-line mud snail is a small spiral shelled snail commonly found crawling around beneath the waves on the north atlantic seafloor while the adults spend their lives on the bottom of the ocean their larvae start out life swimming around up in the water these babies are so small that they are at the mercy of the waves and ocean currents the snail species typically spawns in the summer when the water temperatures warm up enough to signal to their bodies that it's baby making time and the summertime ocean currents in the north atlantic gently tow the freshly hatched larvae out to cooler deeper waters found at the edge of the continental shelf where the babies can then feed and grow and eventually settle onto the seafloor as adult snails however in a NUMBER_TOKEN study researchers from rutgers university uncovered a disturbing trend happening with the three-line mud snail along with potentially dozens of other bottom dwelling species living in the north atlantic they found that this little snail was missing from the deeper colder waters of the north atlantic outer shelf they expected to see increasing populations of these creatures in the deeper waters because the deep waters are places of refuge they're cooler than the shallow waters whose temperatures have risen dramatically in recent years instead the researchers found higher populations of these snails and the warmer waters close to shore which is not good because remember most marine creatures are adapted to survive at narrow temperature ranges and the baby mud snails are particularly fragile they're less likely to make it to adulthood in warm waters than colder waters researchers believe that this shift in habitat is an unexpected consequence of climate change but this is not something the snail is choosing to do see in response to changing temperatures some organisms choose to travel north or south toward the poles to seek refuge in cooler waters but these snails are too small to travel that far instead the snail's physiology makes them easily influenced by changes in the ocean's physics and it's making them migrate in the completely wrong direction first their spawning behavior is temperature dependent so when the ocean waters warm earlier in the year they trigger an earlier spawning event this means those little baby snails are floating around in the water in the springtime instead of in the summer and the currents in the north atlantic vary throughout the year changing directions depending on the prevailing winds as well as the amount of water running into the ocean from rivers on land which leads to the second issue the baby snails are being pushed around by springtime ocean currents which are different from summertime currents the spring currents funnel these babies towards the shore instead of away from it as they do in the summer and the waters closer to shore are shallower and warmer than the deeper edge of the shelf waters that means fewer babies will survive to adulthood and the survivors will spend the rest of their lives at those higher temperatures which means that those adults will spawn even earlier in the year than past generations trapping the three-line mud snail in a feedback loop that they cannot escape from this unfortunate circumstance
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