Cuckoos thrown off by climate change
Posted on: September 17, 2010 - 10:26am
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Cuckoos thrown off by climate change
Opportunistic birds shift victims in response to earlier springs
Warming temperatures in parts of Europe may be knocking the local cuckoos out of sync with some of their usual targets for illicit egg laying.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63386/title/Cuckoos_thrown_off_by_climate_change
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I don't think that you are going to get all that much out of this one.
The fact that they are able to shift to alternate nesting arrangements seems to be evidence that they have some evolved method for dealing with climatological stressors.
A similar phenomenon was seen after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens back in the spring of 1980. Basically, many of the river beds downstream were rendered uninhabitable from the volcanic ash.
As it happens, salmon unerringly return to the stream they spawned in to mate but this time they could not. Well, those salmon lines did not die out. They simply found alternate streams to mate in. You really cannot blame a volcano on human action.
So now it appears that cuckoos have a comparable strategy to deal with changes in climate. OK, great.
The fly in this is that while there are several sub populations that do have specific patterns for egg shells that match their preferred hosts, they have been dealing with natural climate change long before we showed up. This points to two possibilities which I can see.
First, that the host birds are not going on visual cues all that much. FSM knows but the pic in that article strongly supports that they do not.
Second, that the coloration of the eggs is subject to rather more natural variation than has been recorded in the century or so that we have been looking at nesting habits. Thus whatever the selection pressure that moderated shell coloration is, the evolution of shell coloration is rather faster than one might at first estimate.
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I'm going on the effect of warming and offering an example. The very fact the bird has to make changes because of the warming gives more supporting evidence of the warming.
I wasn't suggesting any extinction.. only offering further proof of warming's reality.
Well, I don't know anyone who is debating the reality of climate change. Even the scientists who are critical of the IPCC reports admit that climate changes over time.
Now you may not have been thinking in terms of extinction events but the article that you linked to was very clear on the matter. Basically, it says “we have an agenda and we feel that if we mention the possibility of extinctions due to climate change, we can cause a panic and use that to advance our agenda”.
As it happens, climate change has caused enormous extinction events many times. In fact. climate change is associated with some of the extinction events that mark the boundary between identified geological ages. So sure, climate change can cause stuff to happen. The question that comes to mind is that of “should we expend resources to prevent evolution from happening?”
Well, the answer is not going to be fully clear on that due to the fact that the data which has been collected does not tell us all that much in terms that would bring us to setting social policy.
Let me summarize:
Climate change is real. Perhaps human activity is a driver for current climate change. In fact, it is a large probability that human activity is a driver.
Prior to a century or so ago, climate change was also real. There is plenty of data on the matter. So nobody thinks that climate change is a big deal by itself.
However, climate change that is clearly not human caused takes place on time scales that are not the same as evolution. Climate change which is not anthropogenic can happen over as little as a couple of decades.
Evolution is something that pretty much happens on a much longer scale. So the fact that anything is alive today is proof that climate change in the short term of a century or so is not the thing that will cause the problems that merit moving resources around to meet a specific political agenda.
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The farmers in the U.S. will make some changes.
Plant species are moving away from the equator.
Our wheat is moving out --> going to Canada.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/americas-breadbasket-moves-to-canada/
But Alaska will be able to grow it. (Alaskan farmers take note)
Yes, and Alaskan farmers now grow pumpkins five feet wide. Perhaps in the future, they will grow wheat in some amazing way.
Because, umm, stuff changes.
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No.
Some of the land in Alaska will be viable to grow wheat.
It's not amazing at all.
Exactly. There is really nothing of major note here. Stuff changes and other stuff happens because of the changes.
Which is not to say that global warming should not be an issue of some concern. It is real and we should be concerned. What we should do about it is a really good question.
Here is another fact: There are twice as many people in the world today as there were when I was a little kid. If that is not a problem, then I am not clear on what a problem really is.
So let's stipulate that there are problems. Solutions require that people understand the real nature of the problems at hand. Declaring that one must panic over the impending loss of a single species does not equal stopping for a moment to think about stuff and consider what we need to do about it.
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