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Do Honeybees Defy Dinosaur Extinction Theories?
neutron_p writes "The humble tropical honeybee may challenge the idea that a post-asteroid impact "nuclear winter" was a big player in the decimation of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Somehow the tropical honeybee, Cretotrigona prisca, survived the end-Cretaceous extinction event, despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures caused by sunlight-blocking dust and smoke from the asteroid impact at Chicxulub."
Read that as "from the asteroid impact at Chix Club?" For a second I thought a hot nightclub got wiped off the planet and my chances of procreating in this world went down a notch or something...*phew*
...in bed
This new finding is based on the optimal temperature range for honeybees and their food source - nectar-rich flowering plants (which share the same optimal temperature range), to survive.
However if your living environment has just been destroyed by a meteor, wouldn't these creatures just "make-do" with less-ideal conditions, maybe in a smaller population?
Honeybees are so much smaller than dinosaurs, I don't think we can really compare their adapting speed, ability and mobility.
--
Play iCLOD Virtual City Explorer and win Half-Life 2
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
here in america, we pronounce it "nuculer", you insensitive clod.
I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
/. is there's no shortage of people who'll try to explain this...)
It's known that many species were already extinct by then, and there was a large asteroid impact around that time, causing some sort of a climate change that finished them off.
Based on the fact that many many smaller animals (rodents, birds, reptiles, amphibians) survived the event, I don't understand why it's confusing that insects (even tropical insects) survived as well. Can someone explain this, please?
(One of the great things about
could we not formulate some kind of weather scenario that would result in the deaths of very large reptiles, but not the deaths of hive-dwelling insects?
Why do bees always sting me? I mean I know people who have never been stung that live in the same area I do, yet I've been stung like 20 times, it pisses me off. Anyway, thought I would share that, now back to your regularly scheduled comment...
The honeybees only survived because the aliens took them off the planet during the extinction, then brought them back about the time they built the pyramids.
Honey bees are do-bees. Dinosaurs are don't-bees.
Many species of bees hibernate during the winter. All you'd need is a few queens to survive in hibernation, and they could easily repopulate the bee world afterwards.
I love bees.. Not only do they survive nuclear winter, but unlike cockroaches they wear cool rugby shirts. Sting on, my buzzy cousins! Sting on!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It was a mass extinction, not a total extinction. If nothing had survived, we would have started over again 65 million years ago at a few species near ocean bottom vents. Many, many, many land plants and creatures survived. A much more interesting question would be, "How did Cretotrigona prisca or their close ancestors survive the mass extinction event about 65 million years ago"?
this can only be the work of the christians that want to debun evolution, I say kill all christians, kill them all.
Okay already, I'll go buy Halo 2...
Uh, this is about Halo, right?
My favorite bees are the ones's from Margaret's Honey in Napa, CA. I bought a case of them last month and they keep transmitting me secret messages from space, I think. I tried to decode their message, and I think it's:
PURC HASEHA LOTWOFO RT HEXBO X
I think the language is Sumerian, possibly. No idea, help me out here.
I'll get to the bottom of this somehow...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
"here in america, we pronounce it "nuculer" Jimmy Carter, who is the only president who was an actual nuclear engineer earlier in his career, pronounced it this way.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I can't say she makes a watertight case about honeybees - maybe the optimality temperatures isn't really that optimal, and queen bees can survive for a long time in hibernation. But I think the way
this researcher is thinking.
The bees at some point turned into swarms of ravenous dinosaur eating killers and wiped the poor innocent helpless dinos out. There can be no other explanation.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Decimation is the Roman Army practice of executing every tenth man in a unit to ensure discipline. This is usually done to deal with rebellion or crowdedness. I was unaware they every tenth dinosaur was executed. I get annoyed when this word is used incorrectly, I would use obliteration or some other word instead.
Last I checked you could pop a bee into the freezer for a few days and it will recover after you thaw it. Could this not explain how insects and other simple life forms survived the climet change caused by such an impact?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Do Honey Bees Defy Dinasour Extinction Theories?
Honey bees mostly don't care. Dinasour extinction theories are not getting a lot of buzz with them.
Bees Have one Queen per hive who is always well fed even if the other drones get killed off. But the Queen always gets priority so she can have more offspring. Dinos If they are like modern reptiles and mammals tend to live for themeless And they will try to allocate the recourses for them to survive even if it means not mating or letting a pregnant female starve, so the male could live an other day. These different methods have different advantages and flaws it is can be that the Bees lifestyle seems to have given them an advantage in times of food scarcity where the queen was still reproducing while the Reptiles were off fending for themselves.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The decimation of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago? Pardon me, but way more than one in ten dinosaur species died off in that time frame.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
This tells us more about what we don't know about honeybees than it tells us about the cataclysmic event of 65 million years ago. And its not much of a mystery anyway - many types of bees hibernate, and can be kept for years in a freezer for pollinating orchards.
to summon Bevets to this thread!
I believe honeybees made short-term adaptations for survival. They remained in constant flight to maintain body temp and developed a taste for rotten meat. Their honey probably tasted like shit. Cats would probably fancy it though.
That's just like the Borg!
"Different Mating Habits"
Too bad your message title won't ever appear in a Trekkie message board. If you don't ever mate, you won't have mating habits.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I wonder if ants did the same to survive this nuclear winter.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I can see how a colony of honeybees could survuve a few years of absolute darkness. We all should know how they store a lot of honey, but they have many other behaviors that help them last through adverse conditions. Apart from the queen, any bee will give its life to protect the hive. No help stoping years of darkness here, though.
Bees eat more than nectar, they also eat polen and when both are scarce bees have been known to eat many, many other things to include other insects and assorted decaying plant matter.
Also, a colony of bees has an intellect that is much more than the sum of the bee minds it contains. Like ants, science isn't quite sure how the bees communicate (pheremones of some sorts) but the end effect is that they can guide many others to far away flowers, organize a defense of the hive, keep the hive core temperature habitable from 40 below (F) to 120+ (F), neglecting un-needed bees to death in times of drought, and a lot more.
So, I can see a large hive with a lot of stored food seeing the sun go away and not come back doing some things like killing/not feeding the majority of the hive, the surviviors eating what they can find, and the queen surviving years of hell to create a new colony when the conditions allow for it.
Funny, I always took it for granted that bees would be the ones that killed everything that the meteor/dust/blackout/blizzard didn't kill.
I remember a skit back around '99 (or '98) that were reporting the events and public reaction to the meteor (or was it the sun being blacked out?).
At the end they said "After these comercials, stay tuned for Blizzard '99. Followed by 'Artic Bee Swarm '99".
Can anyone other than me remeber this?
Bees are always busy. Busy bees. Hence they kept warm by working hard.
And by being all fuzzy.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Obviously these so-called "scientists" have never caught bees in a jar then stuck them in the freezer.
Man are they pissed when they thaw.
Ice age. Big deal.
A bit of pedantry here: the dinosaurs were not decimated, otherwise they'd still be here. To decimate something is to destroy ten percent (hence the "deci-" prefix). In ancient times this was often the punishment handed to an army that conceded a defeat -- ten percent of the men were selected by lot and executed.
Soooooo... please don't use the word "decimate" to imply that something has been completely wiped out.
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I thought it was well known that the giant brain killed off the dinosaurs.
With jokes like that, you should buzz off!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Dinosaurs aren't extinct...they terrorized an island back in 1993 or so, and a few years later made it to the mainland (San Diego, if memory serves.)
It was in all the papers.
Why can't we ever seem to live in peace with these noble, flightless birds? Sigh...
Penguins have vestigial stingers.
I think we know what happened to the bees.
A night club? I thought it was a sandwich.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
> despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures
Please don't make me relive my teenage years...
The question now would be to expose them to various types of radiation and see if they can survive it. We still do not know whether or not the great extinctions throughout earth's history were caused by nearby supernovae.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
As a former hobbyist apiculturalist (ie; I had my own bee hive as a kid), I can comment a little here.
A beehive can survive for an extended period of time of bad weather. They survive pretty rough canadian winters, for one. A bee can be frozen solid and thaw out and still be alive.
Cool weather pisses bees off. That is, they get nasty and stingy when it starts to chill. This is to protect the hive from invaders. If an invader comes into the hive as it cools off, they'll ball around it, and sting it to death. I once opened a hive in the spring and found the remains of a raccoon who decided it would be a neat home.
The drones get kicked out about this time. They exist only to breed, and it's not worth the hives time to feed them over the winter. A couple weeks of extended cold, and you'll find a few dozen dead drones scattered about in front of the hive. They literally freeze to death on the doorstep like the little match girl.
As it gets colder, the workers "ball up" around the queen, insulating her and the caretakers closest to her. This is usually in the center of the lowest portion of the hive, because thats usually the warmest spot. They all then go into a sort of hibernation so they need little food or energy.
They make 100s of times more honey than they need, which is good for us. Harvesting all that honey doesn't hurt the hive during a normal season.
I don't know how many years this volcanic winter was supposed to have lasted, but I could easily see a big hive with a lot of honey surviving a decade of less-than-optimal weather.
They don't need to forage, like I said, they store a lot of food. Barring some asshole like me coming to steal all their honey, they could last decades. It just needs to get warm enough for the queen to carry on laying eggs and for the other activities of the hive to take place for about 2 months a year. "Warm enough" is only a few degrees above freezing.
This would be especially true if the hive is underground, which isn't completely uncommon in the wild for honeybees to take over an abandoned gopher hole.
In short, its really fucking hard to kill a beehive. They're designed to withstand a black bear smashing them apart and gobble down a bunch of honeycomb. I'd put my money on bees outliving a bunch of gigantic reptiles any day.
I'd think a bigger mystery is why crocodiles and sharks have survived virtually unchanged. What's a croc got that T-Rex didnt?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When bees are frozen they hibernate real good, like when you put one in the freezer... So this is what happened it got cold and they all hibernated
I have poured hot honey down my pants. Thank you.
Of course, that doesn't mean much in context- so what if basaltic shield volcanoes produce a lot of iridium? The reasoning is fairly straightforward- the Deccan Traps could have opened up, spouted out magma and iridium (and possibly the "sacred" shocked quartz, based on some papers in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta a few years back), and smothered damn near everything on the face of the planet as well. It has also been hypothesized that the Deccan Traps opened up after the planet was smacked with a huge meteor, too.
The point is that while dramatic, there is no clear evidence that the dinos were wiped out by one asteroid. The dinos were in decline before the K/T boundary, and dino teeth have been found *above* the K/T boundary- although they may have been from re-worked sediments, as teeth are very tough and likely to survive that sort of thing. More importantly, while the quandary presented by the survival of bees may seem strange, even harder to explain is the survival of amphibians, particularly frogs and some other species that are very sensitive to environmental changes.
Only if you believe in loch ness monsters =P
Did they have freezers 65 million years ago? And if they did, did they have enough of them to place all the bees in the world into them? And who actually shut the door and (more importantly) opened the fridge door to let them out?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
As far as I know all the talk about the Earth being billions of years old is based on the pre-supposed idea that everything (atmosphere, etc.) on Earth has remained relatively the same.
It's funny how we have a tough time figuring out murder cases that happen just minutes ago (as an example) but we think we know what exactly killed the dinosaurs millions of years ago.
We even make documentaries about them and write it off to our children as irrefutable truth!
Well... if you compare an equal mass of ice to an equal mass of water, the ice will generally occupy a larger volume. Which is why ice floats on water.
So, if there was at one time enough water to cover all of the earth's mountains... where is it now? It would expand as it froze, not contract!
Some crazy aussie in shorts wrestling them on TV, what? Crikey!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I thought a number of insect species had the ability to adapt rather quickly to such diasters. The ability to reproduce in large numbers and a quick (short) life span and changing environment allows evolution to works at its optimum.
That said, don't bees hibernate during winter too?
Also, haven't they also reseached cockroaches as being the only survivors after a nuclear holocaust? Or was that a joke?
Live forever, or die trying.
Even the dumb ancients could tell the difference between flood and darkness. ;-)
And it's the wrong time frame. I don't think humans were around at the time of this event. The time frame for all these ancient writings is on the order of 7-8 thousand years ago - not 65 million. This places the writing very near to the end of the last ice age, IIRC.
An apiary holds bees? That explains a lot. I got one for Christmas when I was 7 and was so heartbroken I couldn't find any chimps or gorillas to house in it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The extinction was 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens is approximately 200 000 years. This brings a small gap to your hypothesis.
On the other hand, a good number of tropical honeybees haven't changed a lot in 65 million years and a great deal is known about modern tropical honey bees' tolerances to heat and cold. What's more, amber-preserved specimens of the oldest tropical honey bee, Cretotrigona prisca, are almost indistinguishable from - and are probably the ancestors of - some modern tropical honeybees like Dactylurina, according to other studies cited by Kozisek.
While physically they may not have changed much, they know little about the temperature tolerances of the bees from 65 million years ago and the bees of today. Furthermore, both wasps and bees survive and hibernate in sub zero temperatures quite nicely, using their wings as a means of maintaining a constant temperature within the hive during those darker months when food is scarce. Just look at the bees in the more northern parts of North America. They survive quite nicely in areas which only have flowering plants 6 months of the year. Nuclear winter could have very well introduced equatorial temperature and light levels equivalent to the temperature and light levels which aer experienced in the more norther climates, climates which support a healthy bee and wasp population.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Aquatic creatues went extinct too.
evil is as evil does
I meant to say that they know little of the temperature tolerances of bees from 65 million years ago, as opposed to the bees of today. My mistake.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
They should reintroduce this policy on the London Underground :).
I agree, decimate is misused a lot. It even has an entry in the OED supporting the modern usage (albeit with a note saying that it's a questionable practice). It's particularly irritating because the latin root makes it so bloody obvious. I mean, it's not like we have a shortage of synonyms for 'annihilate'.
so bees stopped from evolving some billions ago ? Like some species reach an evolution point.
Humans weren't even close to existing 65 million years ago. Ancient humans wouldn't have created a legend about an event that old because no human could have known it happened.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
"Well, I know I will get hit hard for this but have to bring it up....
What about the flood written about in the bible, in ancient writings of India, written about by the ancient peoples of middle america and in many other old cultures? Could this have been it? Could they have all drown?"
How recent do you think this was?
of which this is one, but several people have posted things like, "bees can survive a winter," and "you can toss 'em in the freezer and they'll be okay in a few days."
The woman's an EXPERT in the field. You think she hasn't considered this? If you read the article, it discusses, specifically a range that this TROPICAL honey bee survives in. Tropical honey bees probably don't need to adapt to survive to very cold temperatures, as it DOESN'T TEND TO GET COLD IN THE TROPICS!!!! If you're comparing them to your common honey bee that lives in the U.S., Canada, or Europe, it's quite possible they've adapted to cold weather since it DOES GET COLD THERE.
Sorry, I don't mean to scream, but it's kind of like having a paleontologist try to tell you why your code isn't running? Thanks, but I don't need the help of a paleontologist.
Unless you have at least a hobbyist background in paleontology, you're probably not qualified to even speculate. I'm pretty sure I'm not qualified to question her findings.
Also, keep in mind, we're not talking about a winter that lasted a few months. We're talking about a winter that lasted a few THOUSAND years. It's a lot to ask of any creature to live outside of its normal survival temperature for a few months, let alone a few THOUSAND years. So, sticking a bee in your freezer for a few days is hardly a valid comparison.
Indeed, "decimate" in this context is a perfectly cromulent word.
Crap, there goes the premise for 'Super Mario Brothers.'
"Why do you think it had to be 65 million years ago?"
Because that is what the evidence shows
"And there has been fossils and other things to suggest humans and dinos were around at the same time."
Because there is no evidence showing this, nor would it make any sense if extrapolated from any of the evidence.
Don't confuse religious faith with science. If your faith needs science then it wasn't faith in the first place.
"And there has been fossils and other things to suggest humans and dinos were around at the same time."
What B-movie have you been getting your science lessons from?
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
Just because an animal is ectothermic, does not mean that it's body temperature is the same as air temperature. For instance in South America, certain lizards are active at extremely high altitude, where temperatures often don't climb above 15 degrees C, yet their body temperatures are nearly 10 degrees C above the ambient air temperature. It all simple heat balance. And smaller organisms can heat up more quickly due to radiative heat sources or other sources of heat due to their small body size (=low thermal inertia). So any heat source in the environment might provide refuge for these bees. and it wouldn't take much sun poking through the clouds to be just enough!
Here is a link to one such story.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You could pull the ancient writings theory out to an event 15-20 thousand years ago if you're willing to make enough unfounded assumptions; still not remotely close to dinosaurs.
Do you think that if the physicist had not said "you cannot fly to death!" had said something else, he might not have been stung?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The BBC covered this pretty well recently in their pop-science program Horizon:
z on /dino_trans.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/hori
Heh, Noah's ark?
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Ok. I was going to be lazy and just say that I quite clearly remember from my Environmental Engineering course that this was not the case, but that wouldn't be right.
n swers.html
Short search found this site: http://www.secretsoftheice.org/icecore/sealevel.a
Their estimate for Antarctica and Greenland, which comprise the vast majority of non-floating ice (remember the north pole ice is floating!), would be a rise of 271 feet. I am not particularly impressed with their calculations. They take the current surface area of the ocean and add the ice melt water on top of the existing ocean surface. This ignores the land that would be subsumed so it is probably even less than 271 feet. We would still probably end up with a number of inland seas that would destroy numerous habitats, but many species would be unaffected. Even heating the water up to get it to expand and somehow getting the air bone dry with all that heat, you'd still most likely have a long way to getting Everest under water.
Why do all the world's cultures have a flood story? My answer is simply that fathers the world round had to explain to their inquisitve children why they could find impressions of shells at the top of high mountains. These fathers had no idea of plate techtonics, but certainly could not say "I don't know."
Now I've done alot of research on the Chicxulub event and I'd say that it is a testiment to how tenacious life really is.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
No one listened to me :(
What's new? WarGames is all about nuclear wars, and... :-)
Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, and they fought and they flew, until suddenly, quite recently, they disappeared. Nature just gave up and started again. We weren't even apes then. We were just these smart little rodents hiding in the rocks. And when we go, nature will start over. With the bees, probably. Nature knows when to give up, David.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The honeybees survived because they'd been breed to introduce a genetically altered strain of smallpox meant to help spread the alien virus.
A: Lower caloric requirements and the ability to go into torpor.
... paleontology graduate student Jacqueline M. Kozisek ...
Did it occur to her to ask an entomologist? From Wikipedia In the autumn, young queens mate with male drone bees and hibernate over the winter in a warm area. Oftentimes, a queen will burrow into the ground to keep herself from freezing. In the spring, a queen awakens and finds a suitable place to create her hive, and then builds wax pots in which to lay her fertilized eggs from the previous winter. The eggs that hatch are female workers, and in time they populate the hive.
I am not an entomologist, but even I can postulate a) they are triggered out of hibernation by temperature, so they just stayed until the earth heated up. Winters around here (Western Penn) can spend quite some time around and below freezing, but the ground stays near freezing. All it would have taken would have been a relative hardy handful to survive; if they haven't changed much since then it's not like they were cross breeding like crazy. Heck, for all we know there were thousands of bee types beforehand and these are the only ones that could survive being frozen as queens.
It's almost as if this paleontologist didn't know queen bees hibernate, even for tropical bees. (See here. I will give her credit for an original approach, but even if I'm way off base (which I'll admit) it took me 2 minutes to find 'hibernate in winter' in reference to bumblebees. It may just be the article left out her accounting for this fact, but if she found out about it hopefully she can address whether or not they could have hibernated long enough.
Ok, I know I'm rambling so I'll make my point: while the temperatures were shown to kill off flying bees, I'm curious whether she was aware of the hibernation possibility and accounted for whether the temperatures were low enough, long enough to kill them as well.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
You mean cowardess. Otherwise, you're correct. And it irritates me also.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
They have little fur sweaters if you look real close.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Could this have been it? Could they have all drown?
No you asshat they didn't drown! That is the point, they are alive today when they should have died with the dinosaurs.
.
You can never tell with bees.
sulli
RTFJ.
This is what I know about Bees from a friend of mine who works on them in a laboratory. Bees are pretty resilient to temperature change. I one time asked him how he did his research and he told me that the "freeze" the Bees down to a certain point so that they can pick them up with tweezers and tag them and do whatever else Bee researchers do. The bees slow down enough eventually that they can be handled quite readily, but they don't actually die. Perhaps this adds more weight to the "winter" theory?
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
Nucular, you "liberal" redneck!
Just more proof that honeybees are, strictly speaking, not from earth.
Logic, macros, and more
Don't be ridiculous. And just how much is "all the rain?"
Look. If it rained for 40 days that's 960 hours. If it reached the highest peak that's 20,000 feet of water. That's over 20 feet of rainfall per hour. In a tropical rainstorm the rain is so dense you can't see anything but water, and yet that's only a few inches of rainfall per hour. Twenty feet per hour, every hour, for 40 days, would demolish any vessel, let alone a home built wooden one. It didn't happen. Get over it.
According to the theory of the Ka-BLAM event, temperatures didn't drop more than about 22 degrees. Do the math:
~91 degrees (optimal temp)
- 22 (max temp drop)
= 69 degrees. That's far above freezing, but far below what the bees--AND the flowers--need to survive. So, according to the theory, the flowers DIED for lack of sunlight, and the bees DIED from (to them) cold temperatures. Since they weren't frozen, chemical reactions did not stop; therefore, they starved to death because they couldn't keep (from TA) vital metabolic activities running. And since they weren't frozen, their carcasses should have Rotted Away. But...
they're Still Here. That means there's something Wrong with the theory.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
That's what you get for almost getting the joke, fucktard.
Would it be possible, when the meteor hit, that the bees moved to a different part of the world? I mean, I have my personal doubts that one meteor could cause an entire global change in temperature of 22 degrees! 7 C drop in average is pretty signifcant, and the bees could survive... ... but lets assume that the center of the crash zone had a drop of 22 degrees. This cloud would spread, of course: But! Wouldn't the change be less drastic as the cloud settled and thinned as it was blown about?
If I were a bee, and it was getting too cold for me, I'd move.
For that matter -- when this meteor hit, would it really cause a nuclear winter, period? I confess to not being an expert on this of any kind, but lets consider a moment: Does the crash of a meteor have the same ash and cloud power of a volcano?
Unless it was a super volcano, a volcano would only drop the temperature a few degrees... and a volcano can spew out ash for days upon days. The meteor would be a one strike instance. Without knowing how much a meteor spews up, isn't hard to just claim it would drop the global temperature by so much?
Does anyone know any "factual" sites about how much junk these meteors can spew out?
Also, depending on the type of materials in the blast site, isn't it quite possible that most of the debris would fall back to earth in an incredibly fast period of time? The burn out zones (considering a chunk of this thing is under water.. hhmm) couldn't be -that- large. It isn't as if it landed in the middle of russia, or the mainland of Canada or the USA.
It just makes me wonder if they over-estimate how much damage this thing could of done.
-- RJ
> the word loses all meaningful definition
Oh, really? I don't think anyone had any trouble understanding what you meant by "moron" in your post. It has a very meaningful definition, IMO.
Perhaps you meant that it loses its specific definition. If so, that would be true, and I can't say whether that's necessarily bad or good. However, I'm not sure it's always because of "morons" that this happens. In our society, the word "decimation" would be near worthless except as a historical term, if it were not for evolution of language. If simplicity is desired, fewer words would be preferred, but if richness of language is, generalizing words that have lost their usefulness doesn't seem alltogether bad.
The practice of "decimation" as practiced historically can still be easily explained with relative ease, without us isolating its use to that uncommon reference.
But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe morons like me are decimating the English language.
-Dan
Yes, and both of them had a 'southern bumpkin' accent. Carter was from the south, and Jr. was just dumb there.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Based on what is known about the Cretaceous climate and modern tropical honeybees, Kozisek estimates that any post-impact winter event could not have dropped temperatures more than 4 to 13 degrees F (2-7C) without wiping out the bees. Current nuclear winter theories from the Chicxulub impact estimate drops of 13 to 22 degrees F (7-12C) - too cold for tropical honeybees. obviously, the temperature dropped by EXACTLY 13 F (7 C), the upper range of the bee's tolerance and the lower limit of current models. Where's the conflict? Do I win a nobel prize?
Well, as most people in the US obviously know (51%, actually), dinosaurs never existed, and the planet was created only about 3000 years ago, and took 7 days. So, all of this is a moot point. Your "science" is no match for the Bible, which is REAL "science" (which somebody actually told me previously, with a straight face).
I don't respond to AC's.
Here's the link which presents the abstract to her thesis. Having read and written a few of these, it sounded good until the latent logical fallacies became obvious.
b st ract_80171.htm
http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2004AM/finalprogram/a
Note that she talks about optimum temperature range of the bees, and then contrasts that with projected estimates of ambient temperature drop. Then her projected temperature drop OVERLAPPS the previously projected temperature drop. Also she does not provide evidence that these bees cannot survive in a temperate climate, but again directs us back to it's optimum living range.
Finally, she never attempts to resolve the first leap of faith in her hypothesis. That modern day relatives are metabolically identical to thier ancient ancestors.
Maybe the actual presentation fills in these missing gaps, but I believe that if she had something really earthshaking to say, she would present just enough hints of her evidence in the abstract to make people's eyes pop.
> The nuclear winter theory has been challenged more than once, but the alternatives aren't so convincing
The actual explanation is that some cluebie got root permission and did -
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
They might have stopped evolving, but they're more evolved that US.
I mean, bees can not only survive a nuclear winter, they wouldn't CAUSE a nuclear winter! That's where non-evolution is evolution!!
They also don't need to make WMD excuses to sting you down, won't re-elect Bush (when a leader is THAT bad they wax it over in a nice little tomb and start fresh), and best of all they don't take back anti-pollution treaties and laws by 15 years every time a conservative party is elected.
They're also quite aware of global warming, as the morally challenged bees (aka killer bees) who moved to the USA told us. They're planning to bee in Canada any decade soon, and would like to thank the republicans for helping them make the deadline!
I beelieve they will bee around after the WMD we have to keep in check imaginary WMD of third world countries go boom on us. They've got *experience* and we don't!
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Far from the impact crater a *lot* of vegetation survived - this is what destroyed earlier theories about a worldwide fire (it was actually quite localized).
Are we back to nuclear winter (like) theories? Now I'm really confused.
I was under the impression that the nuclear winter theories were the old ones, and that they were very recently supplanted by the global fire scenario. This happened when some physicists started wondering what would happen to all the debris kicked up by the impact, did some calculations, and came to the conslusion that they would go out of the atmosphere and then rain down all over the planet - turning the sky into the equivalant of the inside of a broiler oven for several hours, dessicating plants and starting the fires worldwide. Global forest/grass fires would then kill off everyting that wasn't in an underground shelter or underwater when the sky lit up. (Afterward there'd be lots of starvation, pollution, and the like. But first there was the accute broiling of everything above ground.)
This was then compared to the surviving critter mix, and it was observed that on one side of the planet the survivors were largely nocturnal burrowers and on the other side they were diurnal, leading to an estimate of the time of day of the impact. Also: Lots of fire ash was found, worldwide, at the C-T boundary along with the irridium.
A fire scenario would account for the survival of the bees. Hives in rock-sheltered locations wouldn't be subject to burnout. The reproductive members of the hive would be IN the hive, and would stay in through the fire. Within a year or less, flowering weeds would regrow from taproots and begin feeding the hive (which can survive for a LONG time - several years - on its stored honey and pollen.)
Are you saying that this relatively recent scenario was debunked, and they're back to "nuclear winter"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Get a clue, there has been evidence to suggest just that.
Well documented manufactured articles have been found intact in layers of coal such as an obvious hammer. There are several others. Check out malachite man, there are several others. Such artifacts are anomalous findings are rare, but even if Genesis flood accounts for the fossils, you would expect them to be rare.
The question is not "Is there evidence?", the question is "Is there sufficient evidence?" Is the evidence compelling, how does it compare to the opposing evidence? You know, actual scienctific investigation not just misinformed blanket statements re: the science or lack thereof.
I know that the links I referenced are religious sites, but these counter Darwinian examples are much easier to find there. I mentioned 2 examples I know to be well-documented (there are others). As you would expect, both are "explained away" by Darwinians, but creationists prefer the non-Darwinian explanation.
As to honey bees, well they seem tomake it through regular winters pretty well. They don't have to get nectar from flowers, but can also use sugars from other sources too. Some plants flower in winter so it is not impossible to think that some plants could have still flowered in a "nuclear winter".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Since bees are cold blooded, I think it's possible these bees could just have been frozen in a nest. When the nest thaws, the honey and all would be a starting food source (sort of like an egg yolk) and they just went back to their business, maybe slightly adapting to possible to flora and fauna.
I'm covered in beeeeeeeeeeeees!
Covered in beeeeeeeeeeeees!
(It's an Eddie Izzard reference)
Speaking of Honeybees... Check out Honeybee Robotics.
What makes a better story? The NASA Mars Rovers being controlled from downtown New York, or that the company controlling them built them with debris from the World Trade Center without telling NASA?
So then why did the New York Times publish the first story on the front page, weekend edition, and bury the 2nd story on a seperate page?
So this means that dinosaurs didn't really exist after all and that GOD created them!
God 1, Science 1,000,000
I don't know if this research casts doubt on a meteorite impact as a cause of the extinction event, but I'm quite certain that creationists will start claming that this is proof positive that Evolution is false and the world really was created in 6 days just a few thousand years ago.
I hear they can't fly either!
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
"I thought it was pretty well-established that the dinosaurs were already in decline by the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago."
Simple: they farted themselves to death.
All those millions of dinos and what-all eating and farting, thus producing methane (greenhouse gas). Result: global warming, and the rest is obvious.
And there you go.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
And she could make the claim fairly easily. Those dates aren't as deeply, pardon the metaphor, carved into stone as you might think. Forex, "The Oldest Human" has bounced back and forth from a nominal 2Ma to 6Ma in recent years and we're discussing circa 10x as old here.
Also, we're still waiting for an equivalent do do for other isotope-ratio dating what the AMS did for carbon.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...all in one article and me sans modpoints.
WOCL (wobbling on chair laughing)
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NOAH
No, ah don't know a . . .
...scratching my head, but I think it's seven *pairs* of clean, not sure whether two or two *pairs* of unclean. Which would probably include baby dinosaurs (a mature seismosaurus would do in too many of the fittings and require a second OBO-sized boat full of food).
ISTR that some major classes of fauna, probably including bees, had to fend for themselves. Bees surviving on a vegetation mat is reasonable, and there is good fossil evidence for floating forests, which would help.
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I thought he was recieving Direct Instruction, and that's how he came to be infallible. Think of him as the Western Pope. (-:
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Heyaaaaaaagh! [gets flung into crevasse]
Sorry, had a brief Python seizure there.
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...'coz in case it's escaped your attention, the grubs which hatch require outside care and feeding until they encyst for metamorphosis.
The conditions TFA says that the bees die under is "much to cold to live, much to hot to suspend animation". If the eggs didn't die before hatching, the larvae which hatched would be dead within a day, probably much sooner.
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...tropical bees don't.
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So says the Flashified Kerry from JibJab's take of This Land.
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...Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent .
Massive temperature changes and flora dieoffs after a Chicxulub could start in days and be complete in weeks. Just how fast do you propose to evolve these fruit-flies of yours?
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I never thought about this before. This is probably going to sound like a stupid question.
How much water DO bees need to live?
Thanks,
solemndragon
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The detailed post-mortae which have been done on them suggest that they'd be amazingly versatile and perfectly adapted to life at the great depaths in which they lived - and died.
Since all Trilobites appear to have died off in their deep watery niche, this would also appear to fairly straitly constrain the methods available for causing same extinction, no?
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You don't whack together a 550' long (ie, OBO-sized) multi-level boat with extreme water-shedding capability, wave-motion-powered drainage pumps and laminate decks in your back yard even with the assistance of your three able-bodied sons.
I think you can safely scrub that bathtub-toy image from your imagination and replace it with a real, professionally-designed seagoing vessel as long as the Washington Monument is tall and with a displacement roughly the same as the Queen Mary. Build it out of very dense woodem members (think Jarrah or similar strength) two feet thick and recalculate appropriately.
Nor, according to the story, did all of the water fall out of the sky (OTToMH, the relevant phrases were "the fountains of the great deep" and "the windows of the heavens") or for that matter fall evenly. If the rain which did fall was induced by shock-related turbulence, you'd expect banded areas of high and low rainfall reminiscent of Jupiter's clouds.
Further, if the geological disruptions were as profound as those posited in the story then Everest & K2 may not have been as tall, nor Marina Trench as deep as they are today. Covering most of the land with a km or two of water would be plenty to produce the massive turbidites and planar landforms we observe today.
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...the science of a guy who can't even get footy scores right? Tough call.
IPOF, creationists are quite happy to have dinosaurs exist, the YEC variety say roughly 6-10,000 years not 3,000 and it took six days. Go and read their own stuff if you don't believe me.
You'd look like a bit of an ignoramus coming at them with so many misquotes.
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[This is intended to be "funny" or "food for thought". It is not at all clear, to say the least, that the Flood and the Extinction were the same event - even if you believe in the Flood as I do.]
The joke has already been made, albeit not in caps and with the spacing correct.
BTW, using any common Unix, you can do that with rot no programming required, and if your system has no such program, try tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m.
And by the way, we're here about your DMCA violation.
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These 1 paragram stories are useless.
Your posted item quoted about 25% of the actual article from PhysOrg.com.
I'm annoyed that I clicked on the link then found no more information than I started with.
lynx -dump http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=$1 | \
gawk '/entries found for/ { e=1 }
(No news means no word)
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All this ignores the issue that all the bees don't have to survive. Just a few hives, or even a single hive, could survive. Maybe it was in an area that was warmed by geothermal action. Are we assuming here that every single spot had the exact same temperatures? Once things warmed back up the flowers will start blooming and the bees will start spreading. In a few thousand years they would spread back to their entire range. Bees can spread across even oceans. To take her theory seriously you have to assume that every bee hive on the entire planet was exterminated. It just isn't reasonable that there would not be one hive in one valley that survived. While the meteorite theory is very interesting I personally think it was the birds that killed of the dinosours. There is a long tradition of evolutionary advancments killing off their ancestors.
It only takes a second or two check, which also lists the correct word if you got it wrong.
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- these bees don't store honey, so they depend on flowers
- the temperature drop wasn't enough to trigger hibernation
- [not from TFA] the queen can't survive alone, nor can larvae
- the flowers in the region don't survive asteroid winters at all
- ergo, neither did the bees
Too simple?Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No.
You're thinking of Philip Henry Gosse's "Omphalos" hypothesis, which is kind of obsolete anyway now that Uniformitarianism is flying into the ground.
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Umm, is it just me or is it common knowledge that honeybee's are low enough on the food chain to easily be frozen into suspended animation and back again with thawing?
Some guy I work with does it for fun in his off hours (Yeah, and *I'm* the slashdot geek).
Ace
Because it's so much more rational to claim, without evidence, that the Earth is six to ten thousand years old than to claim, without evidence, that the Earth is three thousand years old. :-)
Kozisek will present her work on Monday, 8 Nov., at the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver.
/.ers attend that meeting by any chance? I would like to know more about her presentation. For example, in what specific ways are modern tropical honeybees and their food plants known to be identical to their ancient counterparts?
Any Denver
Ideas that challenge what is generally accepted are always intriguing, but deserve close scrutiny. I would be interested to know how much she studied the food plants as opposed to just the bees. There could be localized regions that stayed much warmer than average. Animals are sometimes able to switch food supplies in times of need. A sustainable bee population wouldn't need nearly as much food and survival space as a sustainable population of dinosaurs.
concerning how dinosaurs died out - some were severely allergic to bee stings, while most others were severely allergic to pollen. I wasn't sure there were honey bees back then :)
My favorite theory is that the dinosaurs experienced their own version of the plague.
These theories are favorites of mine, not because of volumes of evidence to support them, but because I like reminding people that big effects may have small or even microscopic causes.
So is that hammer. read
The dating of human and dinosaur remains has already gone through actual scientific investigation and is no longer in dispute by reputable scientists. The people who disagree are, at best, mistaken and have yet to see it, or at worst, religious zealots.
Your use of "explained away" in your last sentence is troubling. I get the feeling you're not a fan of actual scientific investigation when it debunks something you believe in.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
...It didn't happen. Get over it...
You apparently never read the flood account carefully. Its says:
"the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened"
The fountains of the great deep is the key to the source of most of the water, not the rain.
From seimic wave propagation studies underlying the large eurasian landmass there is evidence that there are immense quantities of water in the mantle of the Earth. The crust of the Earth, including the oceans are very thin in comparison to the mantle. The estimated amounts of water from these studies exceeds the amount in the oceans many times over. We do not know what immense forces squeezed the Earth like a sponge to release some of this water onto the surface. However when the squeezing eased, the water was reabsorbed into the mantle and is still there today. A close encounter from an Earth-sized or bigger object from the far reaches of our galaxy could subject our planet to enough stress to do this and also cause the axis of the earth to shift causing the initiation of seasons and a big drop in the average temperature.
From the account in Genesis 9 it seems that the existence of a rainbow was a new thing that had not been seen before. God uses it as a reminder of His promise never to destroy the world by water again. If rainbows were common or even existed at all before the flood, why does God give mankind this symbol of peace?
There is much evidence that the Earth was much warmer at one time, uniformly tropical, even at the poles. Tropical fossils and fossil fuels are found in the now arctic areas of our Planet.
What really happened ages ago is really a lot of guesswork, because no man was there and many of the dating assumptions are just that, but no one KNOWS for sure if those assumptions are really correct. Assumptions is just the scientific name for faith.
All theory is gray
Now they're proving that our notions of evolution are wrong.
Damn bees :D
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
it is written in the article : "any post-impact winter event could not have dropped temperatures more than 4 to 13 degrees F (2-7C) without wiping out the bees. Current nuclear winter theories from the Chicxulub impact estimate drops of 13 to 22 degrees F (7-12C) - too cold for tropical honeybees." couldnt that simply mean that the "nuclear" winter dropped temperature by seven degrees centugrade? it is sutvivable by bees and enough for nuclear winter. assuming there may be little error in the numbers, the overlap can be even larger
---if anyone still needs a gmail invite, message me, i have few to spare.
Stay out!
Hungry, Angry,
Pissed-off bees inside...
Perhaps the dinosaurs were nuked by a natural meltdown? Maybe bees wouldn't be as succeptible to such an event?/ 2004-10/wui s-rdh102804.php
It's possible:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases
To each, mine.
That kind of horse shit is more damaging to the free knowledge idea that the Net was supposed to be than porn and spam combined.
I don't respond to AC's.
I've watched a bee land on my palm and drink some water or lick some fresh sweat (they need salt sometimes) or lick some honey or sweet stuff I got on my hands. They NEVER did sting me while while doing that. On the other hand, try smelling bad, walking around hive on their flight path, or crushing them, they'll certainly sting you. Oh, and in rainy/cloudy weather, they are more easy to annoy, so they can sting unprovoked.
--Coder
dark...lots of radiation.. little food.. Too me it seems like perfect working conditions.
------
insert sig here,here, and here
You forgot the biggest flaw - even assuming they bees had used some kind of early warning network to build a primitive freezer before the asteroid hit - who was around to open the fridge later on?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the dinosaurs were abducted by the DinoRiders.
That's possibly the best one line description of Slashdot I've ever seen.
Maybe all those massive dinosaurs were needed to die off and all those carbons pressurized to become oil. So we can have all these wars over oil.
Isn't it clear. The bees stung all the Dinosaurs to death. I hate those pesky bees.
This is what we have:
1. a lot of dinosaur fossils below an iridium-rich layer in the soil all around the globe.
2. iridium is usually only found in meteors.
3. no dinosaur fossils above the iridium-rich layer.
4. an enormous crater at Chicxulub, dated by scientific methods as being made out of a meteor impact in the same estimated date as the iridium-rich layer deposited all around the globe.
Connect the dots, use occam's razor, and please tell me your conclusions.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
... to be so pedantic and to be wrong?
A dictionary would have eased your gramatical hell.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He'd have had to change the physical laws to do so.
If rainbows were common or even existed at all before the flood, why does God give mankind this symbol of peace?
While grammatically correct, that question makes no logical sense. And besides, God does plenty of smiting later in the book, so I wouldn't exactly call it a symbol of peace. More like a symbol of less-killing-than-the-entire-world.
We're talking about a time when flowering plants were a relatively recent thing.
Todays bees may be highly adapted to feeding from flowers, but it's likely that those ancient bees were more versatile.
Perhaps they were able to fall back on some older feeding habits that weren't so easily disrupted by the loss of sunlight, tree sap? carrion feeding? Does anyone know what bees fed on before flowers existed?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Ooh, I have a new sig! Too!
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Well, he was off by 3-7,000 years. Which is nothing compared to the YEC variety being off by around 4 1/2 billion years.
So your saying that until that point in time, water could not act as a prisim for light, until GOD made it able to happen?
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Listen to what I said. These are evidence, they are not frauds. The question is not "are they evidence" the question is the quality of the evidence.
If you reject actual evidence as fraud, a creationist will reject listening to you. Rather, you should discuss the quality and quantity of evidence. From a creationish viewpoint, evolutionists "explain away" creationist evidence, as opposed to explaining evidence. Thus the use of the quotes in my post. Certainly, you believe Darwinist / Neo-Darwinist theories if you are trying to convince someone of the superiority of your ideas, you do not call them stupid, ignorant, frauds -- you discuss the relative merit of the ideas.
Both of these articles are genuine, in that they were discovered via normal (non-fraudulent) methods -- i.e., Don Patton, a creationist geologist, did not bury Malachite man in place, then dig it up as evidence (which would be fraud). Similarly for the hammer.
So again I say, evaluate the quality of the evidence.
Impuning my motives as non-scientific when all I'm try to say is that all evidence should be evaluted scientifically strikes me as a little unfair. Evidence that goes against the grain deserves careful scientific treatment, that's why we refine theories.
There are a lot of crackpots that have theories against the evidence, however, scientistics closing there mind against opposing evidience is just as bad for science.
If lab results were faked, you are talking about fraud. If lab result are incorrect due to sloppy technique, etc. we dispute the claims as non-repeatable or experimental error.
Sorry, BTW, if anyone' awaiting a reply elsewhere, things are kind of busy right now.
Greenland dumped over 200m of ice on the famous "frozen squadron" of WW2 planes in less than 50 years, equals more than 4m a year in relatively boring conditions, also on a continent which definitely doesn't get 4m a year of preciptation. So I'd be looking askance at what the precipitation figures really mean. Ross Ice Shelf is also disntegrating in a matter of decades, and I really don't see why there should be a big difference between disintegration and integration speeds.
Back to your main point, many Creation models have an Ice Age or series of ice ages immediately post-Deluge. It would be a more-or-less natural consquence of widespread hypercanes. Plenty of ice to go around.
You seem to have a relatively quiet Deluge in mind, but again all serious Creationist models postulate events which would tear up and lay down several kilometers of rock and soil in a very short space of time (minutes to weeks), plus very rapid tectonic events. This implies that our world isn't the same shape as when it started, and indeed a world with considerably more than 1/3 land mass seems quite likely.
The entire geological zone around Lake Titicaca, for example, has been tilted several times, leading to slanted fossil shorelines many tens of m high (and presumably low at the other end). Yet conventional geology has no place for the kind of near-historical tectonics which *must* have occurred to produce this residue. This is but one example which demonstrates that orthodox geology (or at least conclusions based on the research done by) is badly wrong. What remains to be argued is how badly wrong. Precious few conventional geologists will even question the geological canon lest they be branded Creationist and excommunicated from the profession, so we're not likely to see any progress there for a while - but perhaps there is another J Harlan Bretz in the making as I type.
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I guess he figures that in spending an extra thousand words doing that, he might save having to give a thousand of the same reply to armchair experts. (-:
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