Ryan just published a paper in Ecology Letters showing that the number of species in many parts of the coastal ocean is going up, not down as many would expect. He spent the past few years trying to understand how marine biodiversity is changing, but his findings were initially so surprising that he doubted them.
Globally, biodiversity is going down. But because some species have started to live in more places, and different places, what happens globally isn’t what we see locally.
He studied decades of patterns in biodiversity around the North American coastline, and surprisingly, most of these regions show *increases* in the number of species present. At the same time, He found that organisms that were previously rare in these areas are becoming increasingly common.
The natural world is full of surprises.