Gray Whale, Southern-Hemisphere Algae Seen In N. Atlantic

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."

Comments

Only the beginning

[caitsith01]

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.

Re:Only the beginning

[PixetaledPikachu]

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

Re:Only the beginning

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Only the beginning

[Disfnord]

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.

Re:Only the beginning

[Amorymeltzer]

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

[ThreeDeeNut]

I think the answer is unfortunately obvious. There is no profit (supposedly), it is inconvenient, and it is "outside of my control" i believe are the 3 prime reasons people use. I am no socialist, so rather than arguing the earth has rights, i argue that I (and all who desire it) have a right to a livable environment robust with trees and animals of the earth and that I a "Shepard of the Earth" must do my part to ensure its safety in the ways that I can. If more people took this approach and realized that it is their own world they are separating themselves from we would see a drastic change in overall perception and the problem would diminish rapidly. When a million people say "ill turn my computer off tonight while i sleep...", "Ill just run the ac in the rooms i need", and things like that then we will see reductions in power consumption which in turn could reduce power stations, etc. But we have people who believe that the earth does not become affected by our being here. I just say go to Google maps and look at the north east region of the american north east. In satelite view you can clearly see the difference between city and country. When you note the scope of the mega-tropolis that is New York, you realize we do in fact have a very significant impact. This is not a problem to be solved with legislation, this is a problem that must be solved in the global consciousness. Just my humble opinion.

This is bad because?

[ghostdoc]

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?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem?

Gradual change.

Re:This is bad because?

[Arlet]

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[im_thatoneguy]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the North Atlantic supposed to get half a whale before it gets a full one?

Re:This is bad because?

[jovius]

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 that consumes available resources at an alarming pace.

Your question evades the real question about the anthropogenic changes on Earth. We are at the top of the food chain, so it's us who will eventually suffer from the disruptions below. The more gradual and easy the changes the more time we have for adaptation. So there's still a lot to learn.

Re:This is bad because?

[Nursie]

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[pnot]

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[hawkinspeter]

This fallacy was explored by a recent BBC documentary (All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace). Ecosystems aren't balanced equilibriums at all - they are constantly changing and have always been changing (i.e. before humans were around).

However, this doesn't mean that a particular change is going to be good for us humans.

Re:This is bad because?

[Arlet]

A whale is either there or it's not. It isn't half there.

But two whales can be half there.

Current "global warming" is well within the bounds of natural variation

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"

Re:This is bad because?

[Xest]

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 have sites that cater to dumb people like The Register parroting on about how parts of the world were much hotter hundreds of years ago than they are now and the world and life didn't end as a result of that change, completely ignoring that such changes happened gradually over hundreds of thousands of years, not over a hundred years.

It is there that the problem lies. Change is indeed good, and in fact inevitable, it just has to happen at nature's pace, not our pace, else it leads to extinction.

Re:This is bad because?

[Pino Grigio]

This graph is instructive (note, Michael Mann had no part in its construction). What do you notice about temperature (left hand side is most recent)? Yes. It's not only highly variable (sampling error?) but that variability is not unprecedented. In fact current changes in temperature as measured over the last few hundred years are well within the bounds of natural variability.

Re:This is bad because?

[Cyberllama]

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[Arlet]

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[Arlet]

NO. The fact that the change is caused by humans is interesting but not relevant to our course of action

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[Anonymous Coward]

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
Double Pendulum
Perhaps you meant it's not "random" or "non-deterministic" -- they're different words with different meaning -- but it most certainly is chaotic.

Re:This is bad because?

[wrook]

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. But the thing is that those ecological niches weren't there before we stuck out fingers in. There have even been huge debates over whether we should allow grazing and keep threatened species, or forbid grazing and allow the ecosystem to go back to what it was before we fucked with it. It's all very complicated.

We are part of nature. Our actions have an impact, but it's a mistake to think that having an impact is somehow evil. Every species has an impact. It's that whole "web of life" thing (cue crappy Disney tunes). It's also a mistake to think that we should be controlling every aspect of nature. As much as possible, we should let it get along on its own. But we need to allow it to get along. If we go and bulldoze every surface for the hell of it, then our world is not going to be very interesting/useful/comfortable.

Right now our value systems are skewed. We are geared in to production. If it doesn't aid in production, then I don't want to think about it. We aren't paying much attention to quality of life. Or rather, we are letting people bulldoze our quality of life in the name of production without much oversight. IMHO, this is where we need to be careful.

Re:This is bad because?

[TapeCutter]

We know there were times in the distant past where CO2 was 4X as high as now, global temp was 12degC higher, and yet life still flourished, however the point is that a sharp jump, (geologically speaking), to a Jurassic climate will make mince meat of our modern infrastructure and agriculture causing humanity to be dramatically downsized (and other life-forms to flourish).

Re:This is bad because?

[Arlet]

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?

[Sulphur]

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.

Re:This is bad because?

[Arlet]

And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold

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?

[Colonel Korn]

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?

[Xest]

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 where our contribution to extinction events is minimised, so as to decrease the chance of our very own extinction, or at best, avoid large scale decline of the human race.

Some things we can do quite easily- when we allow fishermen to drag nets right across the ocean floor destroying reefs on the bottom, and catching far more fish than quotas allow them to keep such that they just throw a load back in and kill en-masse in an ecosystem destroying manner to bring back only maybe a small percentage of what they destroy for actual consumption it seems clear we could quite trivially at least be doing a lot there to improve efficiency in terms of sustaining both our food supplies, and ensuring a healthy ecosystem that can support continued food supplies. In contrast weening ourselves off fossil fuels is much more of a challenge.

It's about recognising that whilst nature will indeed do what nature does, that if we don't play ball, then we might not like what nature does, and may not have much say in it either. It may be unfortunate that we all get whiped out tommorrow by an asteroid, but it also may not, if it's not and we have at least thousands of years in us yet, then it pays off to reduce our effect on the planet. Well, that is of course, if we care about future generations, and not just ourselves- which was really the problem with the baby boom generation, and why we have the problems we do now in the first place- they stripped the earth of more of many types of raw resources in their life times than in the whole of human history combined- because they only gave a shit about themselves, and their lifetime, and not what happened afterwards. That's also why they're sat on things like big fat final salary pension schemes that the rest of us will pay for, but can't have ourselves.

Re:This is bad because?

[yndrd1984]

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.

How embarrassing....

[cbytes]

When I get lost, I only have to answer to my wife...

Re:What happened in the 18th century?

[riverat1]

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.

Nice try, but the two are unrelated

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Nice try, but the two are unrelated

[JimboFBX]

[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!

Re:Nice try, but the two are unrelated

[Chibi Merrow]

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?

[Michael Woodhams]

That was a terrible article. It has almost no detail. In particular, the only source given for this information is "scientists".

Here's 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.

Re:Says who?

[Pino Grigio]

What's more, it was apparently first found in the North Atlantic in 1999. A good 12 years ago. So what, apart from an appeal for funding (and consequently necessary media hype), has prompted this article, apart from the author's 2007 paper attempting to link its arrival to polar ice melting? As someone else has suggested, it's more likely to have arrived from ballast, as many other species have.

As a gray whale skeptic...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:As a gray whale skeptic...

[berbo]

As a level-headed, independent skeptic I ask simply: TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!

Re:Yet another inconvenient fact.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 a lot of the world's species. Since we're one of them, we should be at least slightly concerned about it.

On the other hand, Wikipedia cites several claims that the gray whale was native to the North Atlantic until being hunted to extinction in the 18th century. If this is so, then their return would only be good news since their population would be increasing.

Were they panicking in 18th century as well?

[X.25]

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?

Sigh

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:What happened in the 18th century?

[capnkr]

And the non-climate-scare angle of that Wikipedia entry (and this part of this story), which immediately follows the above quoted line (screengrab):

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...

Here's the citation

[pnot]

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. 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.

Missleading headline

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What happened in the 18th century?

[fyngyrz]

But their reappearance in the Northern Atlantic is likely a climate-related issue.

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?

[capnkr]

Reappearance, or rediscovery? The ocean is a big place, and algae, small. We find new things in our oceans every day. And 'careful readers' will note:
1: that the algae in question is not from the Southern Hemisphere, as this /. summary suggests - it is a Northern Pacific algae.
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'....