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California’s Birds Are Testing New Survival Tactics on a Vast Scale

61 points by a_w 8y ago

keeganjw 8y ago
Hell yeah, BIRDS!
taneq 8y ago
All living creatures are testing new survival tactics on a global scale, always.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Usually not of this magnitude and in response to weather patterns not seen in (at least) tens of thousands of years, caused by decades of buildup of greenhouse gasses caused by human activities. Two examples of many: https://twitter.com/wunderground/status/1025383601032970241 https://twitter.com/wunderground/status/1025383601032970241, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-scripps-pier-20180802-story.html http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-scrip...
vinceguidry 8y ago
I don't think people really grasp the majestic scale of evolution. All living things are constantly evolving, all the time, in response to threats. The Earth has seen rising temperatures before, but what it didn't have back then was grass. The dinosaurs evolved to get big because they couldn't graze. After the meteor got rid of them, grasses started to overtake the land, providing food chains for herbivores that simply didn't exist, and megafauna went from reptilian to mammalian. Mammals are more adaptable than reptiles ever were, and the other great offshoot of reptiles, birds, are more adaptable still. The hit to biodiversity that climate change creates may not be as large and cataclysmic as we think it will be. And it may be very short-lived. We can geo-engineer as a stop-gap until the rest of the world catches up technologically. China's already starting to successfully push back, Latin America and Africa really aren't that far behind. The developed world already slowed its contribution to climate change massively and is getting better all the time. What I worry about is that we won't be able to save large cetaceans. Dolphins seem to be doing fine, but the larger sea critters are barely hanging on. But my thinking is that the biggest hit to their ecosystem happened 50 years ago and it didn't kill them, so they're adapting to noisier oceans. Maybe they're not as fragile as we think. Ocean acidification has destroyed much of the diversity of coral reef ecosystems, but I don't think we'll ever reach the point where jellyfish take over the seas again. We're seeing blooms but mammals can figure out how to eat them. Managed climate change can have the interesting effect of making the world's ecosystems more and not less robust.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Adaptability depends on having enough generations to adapt. Animals on one-year breeding cycles are a lot better off, while cetaceans are long-lived and the change happens within their lifetimes. > The hit to biodiversity that climate change creates may not be as large and cataclysmic as we think it will be. It may be hard to separate from other human-induced loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, which is happening at a high rate.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    > Adaptability depends on having enough generations to adapt. Just going to be a pedantic nerd and add that population size is the other major factor in adaptability. Larger populations generate more variation per generation.
    - civilitty 8y ago
      The two are very closely tied together and depend on the precise nature of the environmental change. The slower a species breeds, the less likely it is to have recovered enough variation for their population density to survive successive changes. The industrial revolution saw unprecedented changes in air, water, and biomes only to be followed by the mass human expansion of the 20th century which further strained ecosystems simply due to the sheer scale of it. I fear the majority of species will not be able to survive the third event.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    And where do you get the idea that animals lacking adaptability will survive under any circumstances ?
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on 1) when the last time the earth saw temperatures like what are forecasted in the next 100 years (4-6 deg. celsius increase without large scale changes in energy consumption) 2) how much evidence exists that grasses because widespread above the k-t boundary 3) evidence that dinosaurs evolve to large sizes because they couldn't graze 4) evidence that there were not herbivorous large dinosaurs 5) evidence that ocean acidification is the cause of coral reef die-offs/bleaching 6) when jellyfish previous were an apex organism in the ocean ("take over the seas again")?
andygcook 8y ago
I have to be honest. I wasn’t sure if this was an ecological article or one about scooters before clicking through. Glad it is the former.
candiodari 8y ago
Fun thing about evolution. Suppose you consider every cell division a calculation for evolution (which it is). A good global average for cells is ~2 hours between cell divisions (because plants, animals, ... are utterly insignificantly small parts of the biosphere, they don't matter at all). How many cells ? Well one can assume that every spot on earth, on average has ~2 tons per cubic meter of continuous biomass on it. In the oceans this is very uniformly true (and more like 3-4 meters but it decays exponentially as you go down), and on land the topsoil is much the same, but not as deep. A back of the envelope figure for biodensity is 1.210^8 cells/g. So there would be ~2 tons of biomass per square meter of earth, making 2.410^14 cells per square meter, for 510 million km2. That makes something like 10^30 cells total for the earth, each of which computes on average once every 2h. Or 1.4e26 computations per second (and these are full "does this work ?" simulations, not a single addition). > A paper published in Science estimated that in 2007 the total global computing power was 6.4×1018 instructions per second. This means that evolution tries a billion new survival strategies for every assembly instruction any computer worldwide executes.

61 points by a_w 8y ago

keeganjw 8y ago

Hell yeah, BIRDS!

taneq 8y ago

All living creatures are testing new survival tactics on a global scale, always.

throwaway5752 8y ago
Usually not of this magnitude and in response to weather patterns not seen in (at least) tens of thousands of years, caused by decades of buildup of greenhouse gasses caused by human activities. Two examples of many: https://twitter.com/wunderground/status/1025383601032970241 https://twitter.com/wunderground/status/1025383601032970241, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-scripps-pier-20180802-story.html http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-scrip...

vinceguidry 8y ago

I don't think people really grasp the majestic scale of evolution. All living things are constantly evolving, all the time, in response to threats. The Earth has seen rising temperatures before, but what it didn't have back then was grass. The dinosaurs evolved to get big because they couldn't graze. After the meteor got rid of them, grasses started to overtake the land, providing food chains for herbivores that simply didn't exist, and megafauna went from reptilian to mammalian. Mammals are more adaptable than reptiles ever were, and the other great offshoot of reptiles, birds, are more adaptable still. The hit to biodiversity that climate change creates may not be as large and cataclysmic as we think it will be. And it may be very short-lived. We can geo-engineer as a stop-gap until the rest of the world catches up technologically. China's already starting to successfully push back, Latin America and Africa really aren't that far behind. The developed world already slowed its contribution to climate change massively and is getting better all the time. What I worry about is that we won't be able to save large cetaceans. Dolphins seem to be doing fine, but the larger sea critters are barely hanging on. But my thinking is that the biggest hit to their ecosystem happened 50 years ago and it didn't kill them, so they're adapting to noisier oceans. Maybe they're not as fragile as we think. Ocean acidification has destroyed much of the diversity of coral reef ecosystems, but I don't think we'll ever reach the point where jellyfish take over the seas again. We're seeing blooms but mammals can figure out how to eat them. Managed climate change can have the interesting effect of making the world's ecosystems more and not less robust.

pjc50 8y ago
Adaptability depends on having enough generations to adapt. Animals on one-year breeding cycles are a lot better off, while cetaceans are long-lived and the change happens within their lifetimes. > The hit to biodiversity that climate change creates may not be as large and cataclysmic as we think it will be. It may be hard to separate from other human-induced loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, which is happening at a high rate.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  > Adaptability depends on having enough generations to adapt. Just going to be a pedantic nerd and add that population size is the other major factor in adaptability. Larger populations generate more variation per generation.
  - civilitty 8y ago
    The two are very closely tied together and depend on the precise nature of the environmental change. The slower a species breeds, the less likely it is to have recovered enough variation for their population density to survive successive changes. The industrial revolution saw unprecedented changes in air, water, and biomes only to be followed by the mass human expansion of the 20th century which further strained ecosystems simply due to the sheer scale of it. I fear the majority of species will not be able to survive the third event.
- candiodari 8y ago
  And where do you get the idea that animals lacking adaptability will survive under any circumstances ?
throwaway5752 8y ago
Can you elaborate on 1) when the last time the earth saw temperatures like what are forecasted in the next 100 years (4-6 deg. celsius increase without large scale changes in energy consumption) 2) how much evidence exists that grasses because widespread above the k-t boundary 3) evidence that dinosaurs evolve to large sizes because they couldn't graze 4) evidence that there were not herbivorous large dinosaurs 5) evidence that ocean acidification is the cause of coral reef die-offs/bleaching 6) when jellyfish previous were an apex organism in the ocean ("take over the seas again")?

andygcook 8y ago

I have to be honest. I wasn’t sure if this was an ecological article or one about scooters before clicking through. Glad it is the former.

candiodari 8y ago

Fun thing about evolution. Suppose you consider every cell division a calculation for evolution (which it is). A good global average for cells is ~2 hours between cell divisions (because plants, animals, ... are utterly insignificantly small parts of the biosphere, they don't matter at all). How many cells ? Well one can assume that every spot on earth, on average has ~2 tons per cubic meter of continuous biomass on it. In the oceans this is very uniformly true (and more like 3-4 meters but it decays exponentially as you go down), and on land the topsoil is much the same, but not as deep. A back of the envelope figure for biodensity is 1.210^8 cells/g. So there would be ~2 tons of biomass per square meter of earth, making 2.410^14 cells per square meter, for 510 million km2. That makes something like 10^30 cells total for the earth, each of which computes on average once every 2h. Or 1.4e26 computations per second (and these are full "does this work ?" simulations, not a single addition). > A paper published in Science estimated that in 2007 the total global computing power was 6.4×1018 instructions per second. This means that evolution tries a billion new survival strategies for every assembly instruction any computer worldwide executes.