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Not a single emperor penguin chick survived spring in parts of Antarctica
- banach 3y agoAs if their lives are not already hard enough as it is.
- kcplate 3y agoBy what standard? Ours?
- jongjong 3y agoAlmost every animal has a simpler, easier life than the average human. Penguins have a far easier life than the fish they eat. I feel sorry for the small fish; everyone is after them; big fish, sea gulls, octopuses, pelicans, penguins, dolphins, seals, humans... What creature on this earth does not eat herring or sardines? Humans even started feeding their ground up bones to chickens and other farm animals (who would otherwise not eat them)! Give the sardines a break!
- verisimi 3y agoBut what killed the chicks? There's no mention of it in the article! Neither the eggs or penguins require ice... And if there is no ice, the penguins would surely go on to land, eg nearby Rothschild island. I don't get it - lack of ice doesn't kill things.
- omnicognate 3y agoIn the article: > Emperor penguin colonies rely on sea ice between April and January to breed, but any change to their habitat impacts whether chicks develop waterproof feathers, and ultimately survive. AIUI they breed on sea ice. If the ice melts before the chicks have developed waterproof feathers they drown.
- dcanelhas 3y agoPossibly lack of waterproofing leads to constantly getting cold water in contact with their bodies and they freeze to death.
- verisimi 3y agoYes, we can imagine this or that, but we don't find it from the article. Of course there is also the issue that no information about Antarctica can be confirmed by citizen journalists as the whole world (US, UK, Russia, China, etc) all agreed to preserve this continent and Antarctica can never even be felt explored by the public. Anyway, Antarctic information is certainly mediated for us.
- verisimi 3y agoCheers. So the chicks did survive, but then drowned because their feathers weren't waterproof, when they went to swim? Or the ice melted from under them, before they were ready? Emperor penguins can be breed in captivity, btw. So it can't be that ice is required. It must be that the environment needs to be stable. But then the article says it was the lack of ice that did it, not the changing of the environmental conditions.
- Tomte 3y ago> Emperor penguins can be breed in captivity, btw. So it can't be that ice is required. You think the technology to create ice has not been invented, yet?
- verisimi 3y agoHa! I believe it exists. :) I probably should have said that the temperature in captivity isn't likely to be the same as that in Antarctica. I might be wrong, but I don't see them dropping the temperature to -70 degrees or whatever in captivity.
- unlikelymordant 3y ago
- croes 3y agohttps://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-abandon-breeding-grounds-ice-melts-around-them https://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-aba...
- woolybully 3y agoThank you so much for this link. This article is so much more informative than the article of the title of this thread, which does, in my opinion, more harm than good to the pro-climate change crowd with its misleading catastrophizing.
- ryu2k2 3y agoWe did. As can be inferred from the title alone.
- dmkolobov 3y agoIt’s a bit anthropomorphic to assume that large populations of birds can adapt their behavior to rapid changes in their environment on a short timescale. There’s no central planning to penguin behavior as far as I’m aware of. The fact that some emperor penguins can be made to breed in captivity without ice does not mean that enough penguins in the wild will do so without human intervention. Evolution is trial and error. Maybe eventually they would change their breeding behaviors to rely less on ice in the wild. Or maybe a rapidly changing environment will cause enough members of this endangered species to go the “error” route, and trigger a population collapse.
- bradley13 3y agoSort of like p-hacking: If you choose small colonies, all located in a small area known for instable ice conditions, in some years, those colonies have problems. The ice in that area is subject to severe weather conditions, and in some years it breaks up and floats away. Those problems didn't apply to the rest of Antarctica, but by omitting that information, the article makes good clickbait...
- base698 3y ago"factual but not truthful"
- legacynl 3y agothats a nice play on words, but fact and truth are synonymous. I think you're looking for the phrase: "factual but not informative"
- clort 3y agoI guess there is a reason they settled on the phrase "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". This article is truth, but not the whole truth.
- praptak 3y agoKnowing some facts and knowing the truth are different things. I'd say "factual but not truthful" is rigorous enough for a quip.
- whelp_24 3y agoFact and truth aren't synonymous. The connotation in English is different. A fact implies a verifiable statement with no grey area."A man died from falling". The truth implies you have the full picture and relevant context. "A man was murdered by being pushed off a building". Murder of course can't be 100% proven, it's a legal concept that involves intent and pre-planning and your location etc. Our fictional friend may be able to get a technicality that makes purposely pushing a man off a building not legally murder. But the truth would still be he murdered him.
- iinnPP 3y agoSo what happened 13 years ago? What happened in 2014? What months are the images from? Why 2014 and not 2009/2010? Why not a widget handling 20 years? What is an actual solution? What would be be proposing if we just so happened to reach our peak humanity in the midst of a natural change in climate? What part of Antarctica had 'not a single' survivor? The idea that presenting information in the harshest way possible is somehow beneficial has obvious problems. Be honest in your analysis or you will push people away. Given the listing of plausible remedies, one has to write for all audiences. *I'm already doing more than anyone for climate change this year in parts of Canada.
- ramraj07 3y agoCan you clarify what you’re doing for climate change? Always looking for new ideas!
- sethammons 3y agoIt is a quip against the article. The "... in parts of Canada..." can be as small as a room in their house. No competition for that achievement.
- iinnPP 3y agoIt's a bit of both worlds, but mostly for the purpose you mentioned. My household doesn't produce garbage nor recycling(we reduce and reuse). We have no car.
- Pigalowda 3y agoI need some more info here! This sounds interesting. Do you compost your waste with spoilage too? Do you live in a urban or rural environment? I was thinking urban without a car but anything is possible.
- Pigalowda 3y agoHe’s holding his flatulence in. If all 8 billion humans hold our flatulence in we can reduce methane release by 72 metric tons a year. As I jokingly typed this comment I googled to see how much methane was released per day by a human and there’s actually quite a bit of interest in it. A sort of interesting post linked below about cows with some data regarding cow numbers. I always thought blaming cows was ‘bullshit’ given how many more bison used to be in NA before our illustrious ancestors decided to obliterate them for idiot reasons: https://medium.com/climate-conscious/do-humans-fart-more-methane-than-cows-a0f48c590fb0 https://medium.com/climate-conscious/do-humans-fart-more-met...
- gampleman 3y agoThis makes me wonder about evolution. If, as the article says, they have no other culling other than climate change, it seems a crazy lack of adaptability that they can have large scale “breeding failure” due to a few degrees difference in average temperature. Like how did they survive this long in the first place? Surely the environment hasn’t been that stable on evolutionary time scales? Or perhaps a large portion of the population is just an overfitted population and now there is a corrective coming? Can it really wipe out the entire species?
- massysett 3y agoMaybe the temperature has been that stable over evolutionary time scales: perhaps climate change has changed temperatures much faster. Adapting to a 1 degree change over 500 years might be a lot easier than doing the same in 50.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago> Can it really wipe out the entire species? Yes, climate changes historically have led to rapid and mass extinctions. > an overfitted population and now there is a corrective coming? More commonly, there's just rapid declines in populations, and the species survives and adapts and eventually - after enough adaptation - can evolve.
- orlp 3y ago> Surely the environment hasn’t been that stable on evolutionary time scales? Man-made climate change has done/will do in hundreds of years what normally takes tens of thousands...
- quickthrower2 3y agoEvolution is more of a long live the king thing. Evolution producing hardier species relies on death and loss of other species. It is pretty much replication based, and nothing more.
- ethanbond 3y agoEvolution does not mechanically produce hardier species. It merely eliminates species that are poorly suited for the current environment and recent past. This is an important distinction because your framing suggests rapid environmental changes would just more rapidly produce hardier species. This is not what happens. Extremely rapid environmental changes frequently just lop off whole branches of the evolutionary tree. Something will likely re-emerge to take its spot, eventually, but there is zero reason to believe that new thing will be “better” in any way than the prior thing, and definitely no reason to believe it’ll be better in terms of human preference in sharing a planet with it.
- Andrew018 3y ago[flagged]
- jmyeet 3y agoWhile I think the evidence of man-made climate change is 100% irrefutable we need to be careful and not attribute every event to climate change. That's how you lose credibility. Even if you're right, people get sick of hearing it at a certain point. That matters. Consider [1]: > One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006) I guarantee you these sudden warmings also caused problems for many species. Bad years will happen for breeding. This is particularly a problem for species who all breed in one place. One failed season almost certainly isn't the end or the species already wouldn't exist. Also, species will inevitably go extinct (as 99% of the species we've ever had have). [1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-climate-change-during-the-last-ice-24288097/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago> Scientists have recorded significant decreases in sea ice around Antarctica since 2016. While there have been small rebounds in recent years, they remain far below the record high of 2014. The record high was only nine years ago? That seems like a weird fact, and it needs some explaining. Also, the first sentence: > no chicks surviving the spring of 2022 in four of five colonies observed for a new study Is waaaaay more alarmist than the later reveal of “about 30 per cent of emperor penguin colonies across the Antarctic coastline had been impacted by the low sea ice.” The first sentence makes it sound like they’re gonna be extinct in a year or two. 70% of the colonies being totally unaffected is a much different story. Anyway, this is still an important story. But the authors are doing themselves no favors running around with their hair on fire like this.
- gyanreyer 3y ago30% of the entire penguin population is a massive number though. That's tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of penguins affected. If we wait for a problem to have to affect more than 50% before we worry then it'll already be long past a lost cause.
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoNot 30% of the population. Not 30% dead. It’s 30% of colonies affected.
- Roark66 3y agoI'm interested in how did emperor penguins survive previous warmer periods on Earth? The last time there was no ice at all in Antarctica was 33 mln years ago. That's a very long time in a species evolution, but during these last 33mln years there were many times when the amount of ice in the Antarctica shrunk by a lot. Most recently about 140k years ago. Have emperor penguins not been evolved yet 140k years ago? Have they just barely make it through? (just like humans during the last ice age - various estimates claim around 1k humans ~ 200 females that managed to survive at some point during the last ice age are the ancestors of all humans alive today). For an interesting chart of temperatures in recent geologic record see this link https://iceage.museum.state.il.us/content/when-have-ice-ages-occurred https://iceage.museum.state.il.us/content/when-have-ice-ages...
- jongjong 3y agoExtinction is what happens to a species when all of its members look and act the same. Adaptation is the only alternative to extinction in the long run.