Gray Whale, Southern-Hemisphere Algae Seen In N. Atlantic 257
oxide7 writes "The gray whale hasn't strayed to the Northern Atlantic since the 18th century. The Neodenticula seminae, a species of algae, hasn't been there in 800,000 years. Now, members of both species have been spotted in the Northern Atlantic."
Only the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
Al Gore predicted all of this in An Inconvenient Truth:
As the planet warms, the ancient machines of the gray whalean master race will begin to stir. Their instruments of death powered by minute rises in sea temperature, they will begin to send their agents of terror out on increasingly bold missions of destruction. At first the human population will be oblivious. The occasional ship sinking or swimmer mauled with characteristic baleen bite marks will be reported locally, but the dots of this sinister global movement will not be connected until it's far too late. Their algal slime will gradually colonise the land, allowing them to slither across huge distances by night. By the time the 2012 Republican presidential candidate is revealed to be a pygmy sperm whale wearing a top hat and monocle, the gray whales will have assumed total dominion over the affairs of humans, or "mega-plankton" as we are known to the grays.
In 1995 I proposed a bill to impose a 0.2% of surcharge on the use of high fructose corn syrup in candy. The money raised was to be appropriated to fund a crack team of scuba specialists to wage humanity's covert war against whalean infiltrators. The bill was defeated. Now, alas, it may be too late.
Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.
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Maybe his script was written by Frank Schätzing. The Swarm hits pretty close to this, and dramatized as it is, it's an awesome novel.
Re:Only the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.
because it's an Inconvenient truth
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Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.
For the same reason people doesn't listen to greenpeace.
While he says a lot of things that are true the hit/miss ratio is too bad for anyone to be able to take anything he says at face value.
It's not enough to say a lot of things that are true. If you wan't people to start listening to you you will also have to stop telling things that aren't.
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For the same reason people doesn't listen to greenpeace.
Speak for yourself. I don't listen to Greenpeace because they do things like drive motorboats back and forth across the English Channel to prevent oil from coming into the UK.
Re:Only the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
Al Gore is, or at least was, a politician. In the U.S., we have what is known as a two party system. Even though those two parties are often in agreement on many issues, the people who vote for those parties can be extremely emotional about their party. Consequently, to maybe 50% of the U.S. population, Al Gore is first and foremost a "Democrat" and therefore the enemy. This makes it incredibly easy to ignore everything he says as lies and liberal propaganda. And that will never change. The issue has now become politicized, there's no going back.
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This is bad because? (Score:4, Insightful)
So if a species dies out and disappears from an ecosystem, that's bad for biodiversity and can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Now we find out that if a species that used to be part of an ecosystem re-enters it that's also bad and can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem?
Gradual change.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:5, Funny)
Is the North Atlantic supposed to get half a whale before it gets a full one?
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Is the North Atlantic supposed to get half a whale before it gets a full one?
No, don't be ridiculous.
One whale is supposed to get right to the northern edge of the South Atlantic and verrrrrrrrrry slowly put first a fluke, then a bit of its tail, and eventually its whole body across the line, as though it's getting into a hot bath. Which, effectively, it is.
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Is the North Atlantic supposed to get half a whale before it gets a full one?
No, don't be ridiculous.
One whale is supposed to get right to the northern edge of the South Atlantic and verrrrrrrrrry slowly put first a fluke, then a bit of its tail, and eventually its whole body across the line, as though it's getting into a hot bath. Which, effectively, it is.
The Gray or Schrodinger's Whale is sometimes observed doing the hokey-pokey.
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The Gray or Schrodinger's Whale is sometimes observed doing the hokey-pokey.
And when not observed, it manages to be both in the North Atlantic and not in the North Atlantic simultaneously.
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Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem?
Gradual change.
Like the dinosaur extinction?
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Bad? Without that ecosystem change, you wouldn't likely be here. Or if you were, your idea of a "good home" would be a cave high up in a cliff that had a very small diameter tunnel as the entrance. In the current ecosystem, you're top of the line. In a dinosaur ecosystem, you're lunch. Well, a snack, anyway.
Ecosystems don't go through gradual change (Score:2, Interesting)
Ecosystems are driven by exponential processes, change is always "catastrophic".
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Yes, if all the change happened in the last few decades of those 800,000 years.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Insightful)
But two whales can be half there.
Irrelevant. What's relevant is the current global warming is caused by human activity, how it will impact our lives, and what options we have to change it. The fact that millions of years ago it was even hotter due to some natural phenomenon doesn't change anything. It's like saying: "it's not a problem that your house is flooded, because 165 million years ago, there used to be a sea in that place"
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Since 1 pixel on the graph equals about 100,000 years, it's impossible to say whether our current rate of change is unprecedented on a century-timescale, or not.
And, even assuming the current variability is not unprecedented on a 100-million year scale, that does little to comfort somebody living in a low lying coastal city, or on a flood plane, getting threatened by higher sea levels and increased precipitation.
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But two whales can be half there.
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I've apparently been up way to long and need to go to bed.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course it is relevant to understand what's causing a certain phenomenon. If we understand how current warming is caused by increasing greenhouse gases, then we also know how much we can influence warming by reducing the amount of those gases we produce.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame. That knowledge could be used to allocate the necessary funds to deal with the problems.
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And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame.
Really? How? It is certainly not possible to do any of that with GCM's, which are highly parametrized non-physical models that are attempting to compute the far future of a system that is vastly more complex than the world economy.
So if you believe GCMs can tell us how big the effects of anthropogenic CO2 will be, or how those effects will be distributed in anything more than the crudest and most approximate sense you are showing a touching faith in the verisimilitude of computational models that is not j
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What's relevant is the current global warming is caused by human activity, how it will impact our lives, and what options we have to change it.
NO. The fact that the change is caused by humans is interesting but not relevant to our course of action.
Are we even sure that this change has been human-induced? Proof for that posit is still hotly debated - and in fact could be called 'the debate' in and of itself, from what I see.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only hotly debated by some politicians, laypeople on blogs and in the popular press. The debate in the scientific literature is almost non-existent.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have anything more recent ? Science and science publishing has improved a bit since the 17th century. Besides, it's not even true.
Also, periodicals would love to publish counter arguments, as long as they are scientifically sound. Such publications are good for publicity. The only problem is that this combination doesn't happen very often.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:5, Informative)
And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold or that the sun revolved around the earth in scientific literature. That's because science is actually, and a little counter intuitively, quite stuck in its ways. When there is an established fact that the vast majority of the community believe in, it's very difficult to publish a counter argument (periodicals don't want to be viewed as "wacky" for publishing thinking outside the box), and it's led science down the wrong route many times in the past. That's not to say I believe the current position is wrong, but making anything difficult to openly question in scientific circles is unproductive.
1) The scientific method and the culture we identify as Science first started to look like their modern forms in the 1600s. It's not a coincidence that alchemy (which was always questioned and outright denied by many or most prominent "natural philosophers," despite your assertion to the contrary) began to die in the 1600s.
2) Your argument that science goes down the wrong route nicely refutes your argument that science is stuck in its ways - we only know that we've taken the wrong route because science is inherently great at revising ideas and getting us away from bad ones. The most fame you can have as a scientist comes from questioning and overturning (with evidence) current ideas. However, most current scientific ideas are pretty solidly grounded, so the most common claims of refutation are made by whacky pseudoscientists, since it's increasingly difficult to find accepted theories that are genuinely scientifically invalid.
More than any other field in history, science automatically adapts with time to more closely resemble the truth.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who said it was bad ? It's just a sign that things are changing, but the return of the whales or algae in itself aren't bad.
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It's almost as if the natural world is nothing more than bunch of delicately balanced equilibriums! Who would have thought!?
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Interesting)
However, this doesn't mean that a particular change is going to be good for us humans.
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Balanced doesn't imply static. An acrobat on a wire doesn't stand still, he's constantly making small movements, and yet he doesn't fall.
Pretty much all ecosystems we can observe change, but only within a limited range. That's because ones that don't do that cease to exist, or at least transition into something else.
Sigh (Score:5, Informative)
Well smartass, that was EXACTLY what the parent and the documentary are claiming isn't true. Nature was thought for a long time to be a balanced machine (to many rabbits, the foxes do well reducing the number of rabbits and then the excess of foxes dies as there are fewer rabbits to eat allowing the rabbits to restore themselves).
And the documentary showed how this believe came into being, how it was used and then how it was completely and utter debunked. In nature this does NOT happen. Not that nature doesn't appear to balance out but there is no balancing mechanism in place. It is VERY possible for the foxes to eat all the rabbits. No magic rebalancing act. Nature has plenty of example in all the extinct species.
Welcome to new century, some old ideas are going to be replaced by new ones. Constantly balancing eco system is so last century.
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Nature IS a balancing act, it only happens to be on a longer period than will be helpful to one species. The earth has mechanisms to handle global warming, increased CO2, et cetera. We will not enjoy them. Indeed, we are already not enjoying them. We may not enjoy them to the point that our industrial society collapses due to our brilliant location of the majority of our population near the coastlines threatened by... our population. Or at least, its careless maintenance.
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The earth has mechanisms to handle global warming, increased CO2, et cetera.
No, it hasn't.
So I suppose it is an illusion that CO2 is exchanged into the ocean and then fixed by subaquatic limestone? The problem is not that the Earth is an unstable system; it's been here through many cycles, although current CO2 levels are unprecedented. I suppose it is an illusion that when global temperature swings in one direction, the climate goes through a cycle of ice age and warm period and brings it back in line again. Whoops, no, ice core samples prove that this has been going on for quite some time. The
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The claims being disputed here are too vague to be entirely true or false.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, equilibrium governs many aspects of ecosystems. Looked at different ways, an equilibrium could be called both "static" and "dynamic". An equilibrium could be called "static" in that it maintains certain parameters within a certain narrow range, but it does so by reacting "dynamically" to changes.
That said, an equilibrium's *tendency* to resist change doesn't mean change is impossible, or even uncommon.
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'It is VERY possible for the foxes to eat all the rabbits.'
Yes, but it is also statistically anomalous. We're not talking about finding corner-cases, we're debating variations off of the middle of the spectrum.
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on what you consider to be an equilibrium. For instance, imagine a teeter-totter. It goes back and forth, but it does so predictably. That, to me, is equilibrium. That's a very simple system, but ecosystems are not simple at all.
When Steven Jay Gould spoke of stasis and punctuated equilibrium, I don't think he was really using those terms in the way most people might consider them. Certainly, day to day, things change. But in the bigger picture, evolution will naturally drive us towards what, relatively speaking, is equilibrium. There's a steady rhythm, a natural cycle that might not seem very predictable to human eyes.
Check out this double pendulum.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
Seems chaotic, right? But its not. It's just complex--too complex for humans. Your average ecosystem is like a ten-thousand part pendulum. One year there might be 10x as many frogs running around as the year before, due to a confluence of other conditions, and the next year there's a drought and there's hardly any. Even though everything seems to be in flux, it's still in a state of equilibrium. From day to day, things seem different, but if you look at a much, much bigger picture, you find that things stay the same for long periods of time until there's some massive disruption.
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Check out this double pendulum.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
Seems chaotic, right? But its not.
You know, words have meanings, and flatly denying them does not change it, it just makes you look like an idiot.
Chaos Theory [wikimedia.org]
Double Pendulum [wikimedia.org]
Perhaps you meant it's not "random" or "non-deterministic" -- they're different words with different meaning -- but it most certainly is chaotic.
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The gist of the article is the opening of North West passage by which the whale and the algae have passed from Northern Pacific to Northern Atlantic.
The ecosystems always adapt. Some species die out and others find a microscopic ecological niche - it's a natural process. At the moment species are becoming exinct en masse. Are the changes introduced by steady oscillating processes or abruptly as a planet wide catastrophe? The humanity is the unbalancing factor in the process - we are a sort of super predator
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TFA states:
The (re)introduction of a species into any ecosystem is a potentially disruptive phenomenon.
I don't think any ecologist would disagree with that. Somehow you got from that to
can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Where did you find that? I can't see it anywhere in the article.
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It's a question of rate of change. Whilst long term change is inevitable, if change is happening quickly because of man's actions then those habitats may not have time to adapt. If you consider that coral reefs might be able to adapt to say a 3c increase over 10,000 years, it doesn't mean they will over 100 years- you need a number of generations of a species to adapt to the change, the pressures are just too great over a shorter period.
This is what many people don't get with the climate change issue- you h
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No, you're right, probably not. If we cause a mass extinction, wiping ourselves out in the process, that's just life going on, triggering the emergence of new species. Nothing to worry about. Anyway, we don't know and can't know and it's best not to think about.
Nature is hard, let's go shopping!
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Well it is natures way too, but herein lies the problem, it's also natures way of dealing with us as a destructive force on the planet. That is, if we continue to cause other species to go extinct, and continue to cause ecosystem collapse, then there will begin to be food shortages for us, and eventually it may well be our own extinction that comes along.
The question isn't whether we should try and preserve everything, or try and maintain Earth at a static point in time, but how we can live in a manner wher
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they stripped the earth of more of many types of raw resources in their life times than in the whole of human history combined
Did they send those resources to the moon? Where did they put all those stripped resources? Mars? I don't think the rovers had that much cargo space.
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Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
Depends on who you are. Things change all the time. There are areas that have been grazed as a result of human farming for a couple of hundred years. These have developed into ecosystems that are threatened because farming practices like hill farming (where you let your livestock wander around the hills grazing) has gone out of fashion (we reduced the price of meat to the point where it's no longer sustainable). There are species of birds that are threatened because the way we used to farm has changed.
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Slow changes are good. Fast changes are bad. Biosystems aren't equipped to handle fast changes, unless they've happened predictably for a long time.
Especially in marine ecosystems, where there are several layers of predators (as opposed to on land where there's pretty much one), you can not expect to get back the same result if you reintroduce a species after having removed it for a hundred years.
But either way, you shouldn't worry about the whale. You should worry about the reason the whale is back.
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But either way, you shouldn't worry about the whale. You should worry about the reason the whale is back.
It's because they have freedom. We should be sending TSA agents out to make travel more difficult for them so they think twice about moving so far away from home. At least we can build a wall to keep them on their homeland. It's either that or remove their fins so they can't follow the algae. We'll keep them in their habitat... one way or another!
Re:This is bad because? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know it's funny that you think they want humans extinct, yet they are usually the ones shouting loudest to do something to stop humans going extinct.
It's the non-environmentalists that seem to have the deathwish.
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It's the non-environmentalists that seem to have the deathwish.
Don't kid yourself, there are those who want humans removed from the earth "for the sake of the environment". Some are willing to see it done voluntarily, some less so. There are people who go beyond sound scientific policy to worshipping the earth, or nature. Some pursue extreme environmental policy for their own ends.
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement [vhemt.org]
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How embarrassing.... (Score:3, Funny)
Nice try, but the two are unrelated (Score:2, Interesting)
Gray Whales are returning to the North Atlantic since they're no longer being hunted en masse and now their numbers are rebounding. Southern-Hemisphere algae appears in the North due to ships dumping their ballast water - the same way the zebra mussel has spread EVERYWHERE despite being native to the Black and Caspian Seas.
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[quote]I'd love to see the ship that spread whales to the North Atlantic in its ballast tanks..[/quote]
Dude, me too. Imagine the look on their faces when they empty their tanks and find THAT!
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Actually, funnily enough, Abraham Lincoln is the reason those states that once formed the Confederacy have been strictly DEMOCRAT states for most of the previous century.
Hell, Vitter was the first Republican senator elected in my home state since the civil war...
But don't let facts get in the way of your cognitive dissonance.
Says who? (Score:5, Informative)
That was a terrible article. It has almost no detail. In particular, the only source given for this information is "scientists".
Here's [sahfos.ac.uk] a better reference for the algae.
I find lots of articles online linking the whales and the algae, which, while much better than the one linked to in the summary, don't say much more about the whale than that it was spotted off the coast of Israel.
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It didn't happen unless they name the scientists and cite the paper.
As a gray whale skeptic... (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest that there was in fact no gray whale. I am no marine biologist, nor have I ever studied marine biology, however I have read a newspaper article on these things and I suggest that whoever claims they saw the gray whale is only doing so that they can receive more government grants. Seriously, these "experts" - if I can use that term - can't get their facts straight. One moment it's a gray whale, the next it's algae. You don't have to be an expert to tell that these things are totally different and the "experts" are obviously confused. I am waiting for Lord Monckton's explanation - now there is true expert on this.
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If it's "Informative", it's because someone has a sense of humor. If it's "Funny", it's 'cause someone takes pity on people like you and decided to make it obvious. If I get modded down and you up, it's because I failed to see the meta-joke even though I mentioned it in this sentence.
Were they panicking in 18th century as well? (Score:4, Funny)
The gray whale hasn't strayed to the Northern Atlantic since the 18th century.
So, what happened in 18th century that made gray whale stray to the Northern Atlantic?
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Plankton discount coupons.
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No no... Nature increased the distribution of Plankton Stamps but they mandated that they could only be used in neighborhoods of less than N coral density. It was a plot to move all the gray whales out of the better waters of the Pacific into the scummy waters of the North Atlantic. Fortunately, mankind realized what was going on and decided to show Nature that it's plot would not work.
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So, what happened in 18th century that made gray whale stray to the Northern Atlantic?
Obviously, in the 1800's, we went past a global tipping point of Crisis Doom Climate Change Horror. Until it went away by raising taxes.
What's with these lost animals? (Score:2)
This whale and that lost penguin in NZ [google.com]. :(
Some people have too much time (Score:2)
How is Israel the North Atlantic? (Score:2)
OK, I read the article and searched google. How is a city in Israel somehow part of the North Atlantic? I would be more interested in how the whale got that far into the Med without being spotted.
As for the algae, if ships are making the passage they are doing the same thing they did to the great lakes, bringing lifeforms across that have no natural enemies to an environment similar to the one they left. I really doubt the algae is flowing from the Pacific to the Atlantic, I am more sure its because of the
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Ballast water tanks are certainly a problem, but they're not a new invention.
The True Question (Score:2)
The article doesn't address the most important question. Did the whale cause the algae to drift, or did the algae cause the whale to migrate?
What this really means... (Score:2)
Is that we've been lied too...yup.
This isn't showing that global warming is some how destroying our ecosystem. What this shows is all that BS about it being the hottest ever was bogus. Clearly, if the Gray whales migrated back in the 1800's to the northern Atlantic. And they're "just now" doing it again. Then our global temperatures have really just become on par with the 1800's again.
Hmm...food for thought rather than hysteria.
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Clearly, if the Gray whales migrated back in the 1800's to the northern Atlantic. And they're "just now" doing it again. Then our global temperatures have really just become on par with the 1800's again.
Grey Whales didn't "migrate" to the North Atlantic in the 1800s; there was a pre-existing native population there which died out in the 18th century (probably due to whaling). Reference here. [jstor.org] Temperature didn't have anything to do with it.
Hmm...food for thought rather than hysteria.
I didn't see any hysteria in the article.
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So they're going back to their old feeding grounds. Nature reclaiming where it was before.
Not exactly: the Atlantic population didn't migrate to the Pacific, it just died out. It doesn't really matter, though. The point of the paper is to demonstrate that species are now able to traverse the North-West Passage due to the lack of ice, with possible consequences for the Pacific and Atlantic ecosystems. There isn't really a "whales should be here" / "whales shouldn't be here" aspect to it, it's just analysing what actually happened.
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No, what's more likely is that the whales left in the 1800's because they were hunted, and they are returning because they aren't (as much) anymore.
The article's claim that they returned as a result of higher temperatures isn't very well supported (it certainly doesn't provide any citations). It may be different for the algae, though.
BTW, nobody ever claimed that recent years were "the hottest ever". The claim was that those years were the hottest in the modern temperature record, which goes back to 1880. B
Here's the citation (Score:3)
The article's claim that they returned as a result of higher temperatures isn't very well supported (it certainly doesn't provide any citations).
Here you go. [cambridge.org] Scheinin, A. P. et al. (2011) Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) in the Mediterranean Sea: anomalous event or early sign of climate-driven distribution change? Marine Biodiversity Records, 4: e28. (Spoiler: they reckon it's probably climate-driven distribution change.)
I am baffled as to why Slashdot insists on linking to the shittiest, vaguest intermediary sites for any scientific research, but I find that 30 seconds with Google usually turns up the relevant paper.
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I am baffled as to why Slashdot insists on linking to the shittiest, vaguest intermediary sites for any scientific research
I'm baffled as to why so many Slashdotters insist on being fossil fuel industry shills.
It's good to be skeptical, yes, but they should be skeptical of the propaganda spread by those who have an economic interest in denying anthropogenic global warming, instead of being skeptical of properly conducted scientific research. That's the reason why they link to shitty sites.
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They didn't leave, they were hunted to extinction. And while they're "returning", the population they're coming from has probably been separated from the north Atlantic one for a longer time than since they were wiped out.
Troll? (Score:2)
No, I really believe this guy is a genius. After all, if the whales migrated 200 years ago, they are obviously doing it for the same reason today.
Nice abuse of moderation, though. Was it from a second account or just from a douchebag friend?
The algae, not from southern oceans, but N Pacific (Score:2)
The previously known distribution of the algae included the North Pacific (http://us.mirror.gbif.org/species/13292500, click the agreement), not southern oceans as claimed in the title
Missleading headline (Score:4, Insightful)
The Neodenticula seminae is not a southern-hemisphere algae as the headline says. It belongs in the Bering Sea and at middle to high latitudes of the North Pacific. The news here was that the two species were able to travel through the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic since the ice has melted away.
Occam's Razor (Score:2)
How in hell this can be definitively attributed to "global warming" is beyond the pale. It's much more likely that the lack of whaling activity would eventually lead to increase in population and hence migration.
Re:What happened in the 18th century? (Score:4, Informative)
From the Wikipedia article on Gray whales:
North Atlantic populations were extirpated (perhaps by whaling) on the European coast before 500 AD and on the American coast around the late 17th to early 18th centuries.
Re:What happened in the 18th century? (Score:4, Informative)
However, on May 8, 2010, a sighting of a gray whale was confirmed off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean Sea,[7] leading some scientists to think they might be repopulating old breeding grounds that have not been used for centuries.[7]
So, is climate change responsible? Or is it simpler, Occam - like growth of the species allowing a return to former breeding grounds? Guess it depends on your/the 'viewpoint' you need to support...
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Careful readers do not focus on the whales only. The previous posts did focus on the whales only, but never mentioned the climate. If you now wish to change the topic here, and discuss the climate, it would be fair to include the 2nd topic of the article too: algae.
The real story are the algae. Algae weren't hunted to extinction 800,000 years ago. But their reappearance in the Northern Atlantic is likely a climate-related issue.
Re:What happened in the 18th century? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes... or an ocean pollution-related (nutrient,toxin) issue. Or a river pollution-related (nutrient,toxin) issue. Or a passenger-on-a-hull issue. Or a natural (nutrient) issue. Or a current-alteration issue. Or a secondary species has brought them along, perhaps as a parasite or a host, or simply a passenger. Or a geological (heating, cooling, pressure, nutrient, toxin) issue. And I'm pretty sure a marine biologist could extend that list without a lot of effort.
Yessir, the re-appearance in the Northern Atlantic of this algae definitely allows us to immediately draw the following conclusion: The algae has re-appeared in the northern Atlantic.
Re:What happened in the 18th century? (Score:5, Insightful)
1: that the algae in question is not from the Southern Hemisphere, as this
2: The Arctic ice pack did not extend from the surface to the sea bottom, like some kind of ice barrier which excluded whole oceans from contact. You do recall that nuclear subs have made the trip under the N Pole. Who's to say an algae can't do the same, that it *has* to have come through the NW passage?
This article - and it's suppositions - are sadly lacking in any detail of merit. It is climate-scare puffery with little to back it up, IMO. Let's get back to 'News for Nerds'....
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So, is climate change responsible? Or is it simpler, Occam - like growth of the species allowing a return to former breeding grounds? Guess it depends on your/the 'viewpoint' you need to support...
Or, even more probable, both are correct. Throughout history species have taken advantage of changes in regional climate (and in particular its effects on other fauna and flora) to expand into new localities.
In the ocean, even a slight change in temperature can cause massive changes in algae and hence crustacean populations, as has been much documented. However if you RTFA the direct reason for their return seems to be the now regular summer thawing of the North West Sea Passage, which is seen as evidence o
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For the gray whale, and only in a limited way and for a time. If the Northern Atlantic becomes an attractive habitat for a species that wasn't there before, that could mean the climate and ecosystem are changing significantly, and other species that were there before will no longer thrive. It could also mean other habitats will change, with their own resulting migrations and extinctions.
Sudden changes in the world's ecology aren't rare on a long-term scale, but they often have catastrophic consequences for
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How would you know it was gay, unless there were two of them (of the same sex)
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Gray is the new Humpback. I thought the entire fishion industry new that.
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You sir, would have got the "most double entendres in a single post", if only you had logged in instead of postingAC...