From the Queen Mary, University of London , there was shrinkage, of plankton no less. I’m sure it’s easy to extrapolate that right up to the top of the food chain.
How global warming could cause animals to shrink
The way in which global warming causes many of the world’s organisms to shrink has been revealed by new research from Queen Mary, University of London.
Almost all cold-blooded organisms are affected by a phenomenon known as the ‘temperature-size rule’, which describes how individuals of the same species reach a smaller adult size when reared at warmer temperatures. But until now, scientists have not fully understood how these size changes take place.
Writing in the journal The American Naturalist, Dr Andrew Hirst and colleagues from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences explore this unusual shrinking effect in more detail, and show conclusively how it occurs.
Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, the study was carried out using data on marine planktonic copepods. These tiny crustaceans are the main animal plankton in the world’s oceans and are important grazers of smaller plankton and a food source for larger fish, birds and marine mammals.
By gathering together more than 40 years of research studying the effect of temperature on these organisms, their results show that growth rate (how fast mass is accumulated) and development rate (how fast an individual passes through its life stages) are consistently decoupled in a range of species, with development being more sensitive to temperature than growth.
Dr Hirst explains: “We’ve shown that growth and development increase at different rates as temperatures warm. The consequences are that at warmer temperatures a species grows faster but matures even faster still, resulting in them achieving a smaller adult size.
“Decoupling of these rates could have important consequences for individual species and ecosystems,” he added.
The team’s findings suggest that rates fundamental to all organisms (such as mortality, reproduction and feeding), may not change in synch with one another in a warming world. This could have profound implications for understanding how organisms work, and impact on entire food webs and the world’s ecosystems.
Although the team’s findings disagree with earlier assertions of many macro-ecologists, they clearly explain the smaller sizes associated with the ‘temperature-size rule’. They hope their work will help those investigating the potential impacts of climate change on the natural world.
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This would explain why the dinosaurs were so small.
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Now that’s bad science. The largest creatures in the world have mostly been from warmer climates.
Am I missing something here? The gist of the press release seems to clearly imply smaller “ultimate” size, but the research only supports a smaller size at maturity (since the animals reach maturity more quickly). I wouldn’t know a copepod from a cephalopod . . . or a podiatrist, for that matter . . . but do plankton really stop growing when they reach maturity? Somehow, I doubt it. It also seems to me that maturing more quickly would have a positive impact on biomass by increasing the rate at which the population reproduces.
Well, in that case, I guess what they are trying to warn us about, is that all these animals will in fact grow, as the temperature drops. Right?
And if tons upon tons ( Much hicher tonnage than humanity, by the way) of these small creatures grows, wouldnt that in fact make the sealevel rise? As the temerature drops, I mean?
Good grief, we might end up with the pacific as just one big organic slurry…..
But wait, there is one place they would grow. In Trenberth’s Hidden Heat Belt at the bottom.
Hmmm, will be difficult to model all this.
I simply cannot believe the depths to which upside-down science has taken the reasoning faculties of some people. How global warming “could” cause things to shrink? It “could” cause pigs to fly. It “could” do any number of things. BUT FIRST OF ALL IT HAS TO HAPPEN IN MEASURABLE AND SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS. Blimey these people are obsessed. Off all the things in nature they could research, they have to remind us that some sea bug might shrink by a nanometer or so because of something that “could” happen. What, pray tell, does science do about things that are “actually happening”? I guess that’s not interesting enough.
So just how cold were the Jurassic/Permian periods?
From earlier Seinfeld episodes, I thought just the opposite. Shrinkage occurs in colder waters.
Did they look at the other end of the scale?
I would have thought when the temperature really drops that the lack of food would cause even smaller & weaker adults.
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
Augustus De Morgan; A Budget of Paradoxes
So all we need to do is just move along one digit. And we all thought it was turtles all the way down!
Yes, but size is not everything. What about the total mass. If development is faster, then will there not be more of them? If total nutritional mass, if I may invent a new term, does not change, there will be just as much food for animals higher up in the food chain.
They can show this for a 1 degree C change? A change far smaller than day/night or summer/winter changes? 10-4.
Also, if dinosaurs were cold-blooded, why were they so big?
Odd, I can’t cope. (With this stuff.)
Just because you observe different outcomes in response to environmental changes, it doesn’t mean the system is broken. Species have to deal with changing conditions all the time. Usually, where conditions are more favorable, more progeny are produced. Populations shift. How many samples were taken? Where? (Did they see any dead polar bears? ;->)
By studying the organisms further, perhaps we would discover the smaller size is a natural adaptation to enhance survival. Perhaps it helps them avoid a new predator. This is one species (or maybe a set of related species). Claiming we now understand the response of a few organisms to environmental change is silly. Extrapolating their conclusion to the whole ocean is ridiculous.
Naturally, they need more money to continue this important research….
It’s not in the Sep edition of American Naturalist, or their list of press releases. Making announcements without the data to back it up does not reflect well on QM.
From my memory of population dynamics (mathematical; Lotka–Volterra, BIDE etc.), earlier maturity implies an increase in population size. So more of them, albeit smaller.
hmmm…Let’s see…The three largest land animals are found on what continent?
So how does this new natural law “Hotter is smaller” jive with dinosaurs???
During the Cretaceous oceans were an average of 13 degrees centigrade and new finding seem to indicate a fall to as low as four degrees is what killed off the large dinosaurs.
“…Dr Price, along with Dr Elizabeth Nunn, of Johannes Gutenburg Universitat in Mainz, Germany, first visited Svalbard in 2005 to collect fossils and samples, in an area famed for a number of paleontological discoveries, including giant marine reptiles such as pliosaurs and icthyosaurs.
The samples were analysed back in Plymouth and prompted return trips to the area to gather more evidence.
“The flourishing of the dinosaurs and a range of other data indicates that the Cretaceous period was considerably warmer and boasted a high degree of CO2 in the atmosphere,” said Dr Price.
“But over a period of a few hundred or a few thousand years, ocean temperatures fell from an average of 13 degrees centigrade to between eight and four degrees…..” http://www.physorg.com/news191527326.html
Then there is Africa with its very large species of animals.
Yes I know this is talking about shrinkage within a species but I think they are missing something…. more competition for food perhaps??
Oh yes, tenure and compensation are directly proportional to global warming and inversely proportional to organism size.
So warming makes them mature faster, leading to higher biological productivity. That’s surely a good thing, even Lovelock, Mead and Ehrlich must agree with that. That is, if these tiny crustaceans actually have a way of noticing the 0.8C global average atmospheric temperature rise over the 20th century.
There’s some that figure dinosaurs were warm-blooded. This is talking about cold-blooded animals, hence the probable difference.
I wonder how small the copepods were during all those periods (just during the last 10,000 years) when temperatures were substantially higher than today.
What about 125,000 years ago during the Eemian?
How about sometime prior to the current multimillion year long Ice Age?
So Blue Whales just LOOK that big; it really is all in your mind.
Perhaps they should repeat the study using horse flies. The mothers here in NC are 747’s compared to the B52’s in New England. The reach over one inch in length routinely.
Or better yet compare Coakroaches in Calgory Canada to those in Jamaica, after all they are one of the oldest unchanged species around….
If biological niches didn’t evolve, we’d still be creeping out of the sea.
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“Almost all cold-blooded organisms are affected by a phenomenon known as the ‘temperature-size rule’ …”
The important words being “Almost all cold-blooded” or so I would assume.
What I get from this is that as the temp rises another o.3C in the next 50 years,climate believers wil lshrink and thus their thieving of money.Plus they should shrink faster then any cepopods,as these guys have bigger brains then QM staff.