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.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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'....