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Climate Change Prompts Emperor Penguins To Find New Breeding Grounds
An anonymous reader writes Researchers have discovered that emperor penguins may not be faithful to their previous nesting locations, as previously thought. Scientists have long thought that emperor penguins were philopatric, returning to the same location to nest each year. However, a new research study showed that the penguins may be behaving in ways that allow them to adapt to their changing environment. Lead author Michelle LaRue said,"Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins. If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail, these new colonies we see on satellite images wouldn't make any sense. These birds didn't just appear out of thin air—they had to have come from somewhere else. This suggests that emperor penguins move among colonies. That means we need to revisit how we interpret population changes and the causes of those changes."
OK, and this is part of climate change how? They have done it for years, but now it's part of "climate change"?
It has come to this.
*ALL* Species, without exception, adapt to their environment. That is how they survive.
Any connection to "climate change" was purely speculative on the part of the article writer.
The research actually suggested that Emperor Penguins always had changed locations periodically. There is no evidence that modern times are in any way different.
The only thing this is "evidence" of is that lots of people today will try to blame anything and everything on "climate change".
Perhaps " If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail" is wrong. Perhaps they go to the best location they can find?
...they got tired of all of the scientists following them around, year after year, tagging them and annoying the kids.
"Y'know, Marge, this place is just getting too touristy for me. Let's go somewhere quiet, farther down the beach."
Underwater volcanoes, not climate change, reason behind melting of West Antarctic Ice Sheet
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/8278/20140610/underwater-volcanoes-climate-change-reason-melting-west-antarctic-ice.htm
The penguins have to move in order to not nest in their own foul wastes. They move to a clean area.
...In Highly Evolved Species. Film at 11:00.
The IPCC predicts that humans will sit around in exactly the same spots for the next few centuries, come rain or high water. Humans obviously can't do in hundreds of years what penguins can do in a year.
" these new colonies we see on satellite images .."
"... Prompts Emperor Penguins To Find New Breeding Grounds"
Maybe they are just trying to find a little privacy?
They thought decreasing numbers were due to birds dying, but they were actually due to birds changing breeding locations (for unknown reasons).
Basically, and contrary to the headline, the article says they don't know enough about penguin breeding behavior to draw any conclusions.
"Over five years in the late 1970s, the Southern Ocean warmed and at the same time the penguin colony at Pointe Géologie, declined by half (6,000 breeding pairs to 3,000 breeding pairs). The decline was thought to be due to decreased survival rates. In other words, researchers thought that the warming temperatures were negatively impacting the survival of the species...'It’s possible that birds have moved away from Pointe Géologie to these other spots and that means that maybe those banded birds didn’t die,' LaRue said. 'If we want to accurately conserve the species, we really need to know the basics. We’ve just learned something unexpected, and we should rethink how we interpret colony fluctuations.'”
P.S. Want to know why people are skeptical about climate change "science" and advocacy? It's because of blurbs like this one that say one thing in the headline and something else in the linked-to article.
Its common for newspapers to take an AP story word for word and change the headline to something that they think will get them more views. Notice next time you see a similar story in multiple news sites that is sourced from the AP. They match exactly but the individual sites will change headline to get more clicks.
The funny part about this instance is the AGW supporters commenting about how this does support their position despite the story saying nothing of the sort. They can't even boter to read the story before defending it. That shows how knowledgable they are about what they comment on, not at all.
That is fantastic. Temperature variations in Antarctica span about 100 degrees, ranging from a low -90 in the winter to about +10 in the coastal areas during the summer and overcast conditions.Considering the range, it's quite extraordinary that less that one degree of change can wreak havoc in the lives of emperor penguins. One must wonder how they survive any temperature change at all if a barely measurable shift over a century in duration can have such a dramatic effect. It is even more strange that these emperor penguins have trouble with increasing temperatures as Antarctic average temperature has dropped slightly over the last half century, even setting a new record low of -93C (satellite measurements) quite recently (2010). This makes you wonder how much BS people can take before they say, ENOUGH!
Does it really matter what or who is causing climate change at this point? Maybe we should be debating the best ways to curb it and protect ourselves from its effects...
I left Aridzona because it was getting too hot, moved to Washington (the state) where it rains all the time. So, did Climate change cause my move? NO! the phrase "climate change", aka "global warming", wasn't known in 1980.
For those who travel, try Eastern Washington, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channeled_Scablands, and excellent example of Climate Evolution.
If the environment changes faster than a species can adapt, it is selected against, and goes extinct.
In fact, by definition, all extinctions of the past were caused by environmental changes faster than the species could adapt.
I would imagine that if we had been able to prevent all the extinctions of the cretaceous, humanity would never have arrived.
Who are we to deny the life forms who will be here 10 million years from now thanks to the various waves of extinction prior to their arrival a chance at existence?
By strictly focusing on existing species survival and the thwarting of selective pressures, aren't we in fact denying the future existence of species that would've arisen from those pressures, regardless of their source?
Seems only to be a blog post of the UoM. Did anybody dig up the publication?
It is a simple observational practice with no first principles and a singular assumption: animals are mindless automatons.
With that one assumption, biologists are consistently surprised by what they observe.
Given enough time/resources/interest, they may observe enough to get true understanding.
Unfortunately, they will never ever have enough time/resources/interest.
Biology isn't pointless, but don't call it a science.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I was at the IdeaCity conference this past week, Michelle was there as an invited speaker and gave the first public presentation on this research. It's a great talk: http://www.ideacityonline.com/...
"Over five years in the late 1970s, the Southern Ocean warmed." Warming temperatures over a period of years is by definition climate change. If I write 1+1=2, I'm still doing arithmetic even if I don't specifically call it "arithmetic." True there's no advocacy-ready insinuation of man-made global warming being at fault, but that's not what the headline says either. It's an accurate encapsulation of what is in the article.
And don't know where you're getting "for unknown reasons" from. The only material change is that they went from thinking there was an outright population decrease to realizing that the birds were just nesting in a different region. But the article is still correlating the breeding grounds change with the period of oceanic warming.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Ever notice how it's only the Pro-Climate Change (aka Global Warming) articles that get posted here? The admins and contributors are such political tools.
The truth is out. Give it up. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html
Your first mistake is to assume that we can't survive without an ecosystem replete with a shit-load of species.
Your second mistake is to assume that we can preserve this aforementioned shit-load of species and stop selective pressure from happening.
Now, perhaps we won't last as as long as the coelacanth, or the shark, and it will turn out that homo sapiens gives way to some other species after selective pressures generate "homo superior" or whatever nomenclature you'd like to use. Maybe that's sad to some people...but if I was an australopithecus afarensis, staring down the barrel of extinction with the knowledge that my progeny would eventually be selectively pressurized into homo sapiens, would that be such a bad thing?
The problem with being afraid of change is that it always does.
Tech Times headlines this as "Climate change prompts Emperor penguins to find new breeding grounds" The researchers press report is titled like this: "New research using satellite images reveals that emperor penguins are more willing to relocate than previously thought" The reporter from Tech Times basically lied to create a headline. If you read the original press release it says nothing about global climate change. The researchers did not make this conclusion- the fiction writer that wrote the article made it up. http://cse.umn.edu/admin/comm/...
That is the real reason they are moving, but no one wants to criticize the sacred cow of commercial fishing....
Maybe they just got tired of walking around all the bird poo that builds up in a location and moves to a "clean" location. It not like it can get wash away in the rain and could coat the ice inches think.