The ocean’s mysterious vitamin deficiency
California researchers now investigating the source of [the Sacramento River's Chinook] salmon’s nutritional problems find themselves contributing to an international effort to understand thiamine deficiency, a disorder that seems to be on the rise in marine ecosystems across much of the planet. It’s causing illness and death in birds, fish, invertebrates, and possibly mammals, leading scientists from Seattle to Scandinavia to suspect some unexplained process is compromising the foundation of the Earth’s food web by depleting ecosystems of this critical nutrient.