Canadian Harp Seals may have “read” the predictions of the coming decades of stabilization of global temperatures and perhaps some cooling. Animals like the Harp Seal have experienced many millions of years of climatic change and, through the complex processes of evolution and natural selection, may have developed an ability to sense coming changes.
This is from The Boston Channel:
Small numbers of juvenile harp seals are typically found each winter stranded along the coast of the northeastern United States. But this year, well over 100 adult harp seals – not juveniles – have been spotted … In some areas they’re reporting three times the normal number of sightings … we’ve had four sightings of adult harp seals in North Carolina, which we’ve never had before. We typically don’t see them that far south. …
For now, there is no clear explanation for why more seals are showing up in U.S. waters, said Gordon Waring, who heads the seal program at NOAA’s fisheries science center in Woods Hole, Mass.
They could be making their way south because of climatic conditions or perhaps in search of food, Waring said.
“These animals are known to wander a lot,” Waring said. “Whether they’re following food down or whatever, we don’t really have a good understanding of it.”
Garron said she and the seal organizations will look at environmental trends, such as water temperatures, to see if it’s influencing the harp seal range.
Regardless of the reason, biologists are taking notice, Doughty said.
Read more from The Boston Channel here.
Here is a 2009 WUWT item about Henrik Svensmark and his Global Cosmic Ray theory of how reduced Solar activity leads to cooling periods. Svensmark says “In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable …”
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North Atlantic Ocean’s currents are one of principal, if not the principal factor, in regulating the region’s temperatures. It is now clear (for time being private findings) that the actual downtrend has started around a decade ago.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NAP.htm
Bob Tisdale recently made an article about the SST around the US coast. It was falling like a rock. No wonder those poor animals are forced to migrate north, err, south, because of warm temperatures in the Arctic, err, because of climate change, uhm nevermind.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 10:21 pm
I am quite certain that the effect of GCR’s on the Earths climate is in it’s infancy of understanding.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 10:18 pm
There is a detector readout. You pass the detector over the ice core and watch the readout. The ice core data is good. Even shows the eleven year cycle.
Now there is as good of a red herring as can be found. The GCRs effects on the ice cores are NOT freshly incoming. Not only that, Leif, but the GCRs penetrate deeply, and can affect many layers of ice/snow far below the surface, thereby averaging out the data. I’ll believe you when you say that you can read the 11 year cycles from the Sun doing things to layers of ice.
I just don’t buy the jump of that into a proxy for GCR levels.
How does ice re-emit GCRs?
Besides polar bears and Inuits finding seals yummy, the Great White Shark thinks they taste good. (There were Great White Shark warnings last summer on Cape Cod.)
By the way, in terms of survival-of-the-fittest, is not the shark so fit that it didn’t need to evolve much over millions and millions of years?
We, on the other hand, are said to have evolved from a pathetic loser of a fish, which was driven by the fitter fish into the muddy, murky shallows, and then right out of the water.
The fit only survive, while pathetic losers like me dominate the world! Bwah hah hah!
Dear Dr. Svalgaard,
Being a professional writer, I am perfectly aware of the “usual English phrases” without your enlightened help.
It would really help if you would provide some factual reasons supporting your continuing rejection of the Svensmark theory.
Come-offs of the third grade level just won’t do.
When was the last time Harp Seals were found on the Carolina coast?
Now, that’s strange…. here where I live (eastern europe, midlatitudes) last year has been exceptionally sunny and fair weather, especially this last winter…. the month of march chiefly continues the same trend.
(SarcOn)Canadian Harp Seals are cousins of Florida’s Manatee’s. The closer they get, the colder OR warmer it becomes.(SarcOff)
Dave Springer says:
March 21, 2011 at 10:16 pm
There are many critters alive today called “living fossils”. They don’t appear to have developed at all over enormous stretches of time.
‘developed’? Evolution is not development.
This simply means that their tolerance range is broad enough.
Mr Green Genes says:
March 22, 2011 at 2:23 am
doesn’t your remark apply to you in this instance? You appear to be implying in your earlier post (The long-term changes in cosmic ray intensity have been so small […] that one cannot blame the cooling on the cosmic rays) that you’ve made up your mind on the issue.
regardless of whether the mechanism works, if there is not enough variation in the cosmic rays you do not get any effect.
rbateman says:
March 22, 2011 at 2:46 am
The GCRs effects on the ice cores are NOT freshly incoming. Not only that, Leif, but the GCRs penetrate deeply, and can affect many layers of ice/snow far below the surface, thereby averaging out the data.
The GCRs do not interact with the ice or penetrate or such. The GCRs produce 10Be high up in the atmosphere. The radioactive 10Be is gently deposited on the surface [fallout] and stays there as part of the annual layers of snow [becoming ice] that make up the ice core. Measuring the amount of radioactive 10Be in a particular annual layer tells us the GCR intensity for that year.
Alexander Feht says:
March 22, 2011 at 3:00 am
It would really help if you would provide some factual reasons supporting your continuing rejection of the Svensmark theory.
Simple: regardless of whether the physics behind the theory works, there has not been enough variation in the intensity of the cosmic rays.
Come-offs of the third grade level just won’t do.
Just trying to stoop to your level.
Ira Glickstein, PhD
Ira … the photo is not of a juvenile harp seal … it’s a juvenile grey seal. They are both white which can lead to confusion. However, there is a morphological difference which you can see if you look at some pictures. In addition … harps give birth in late Feb/early March and greys in Jan/Feb. I believe you said the pic was taken in January.
Hope this helps.
Jon
There are a number of very silly ideas in this article about evolution and animal behavior.
The idea that evolution can develop a predictive sense or have any foresight is nonsense, evolution only responds to present conditions, it cannot make impossible predictions about the future and evolve a capability to respond to that future before it happens.
Second, any change in behavior of the species is a response to PRESENT conditions not to future changes. Obviously if the seals started acting as if there was cooling when there isn’t they would not be maximizing survival.
The reason seals have survived through past climate changes is that they have evolved flexible feeding stratergies. Or to be more accurate, the seals that did not have flexible feeding patterns died out when the climate changed.
Any changes in behavior seen in the seals at present is a rexsponse to PRESENT changes in the climate and feeding opportunities, not anticipation of speculative future cooling for which there is no evidence.
Sea ice in the spring/summer is an important component of the ecololgy that forms the base of the polar ocean food chain. Photosynthetic organisms use the ice as a growing substrate. It is also important as a breeding ground for the seals. The present changes in seal behavior are most likely to be responses to the reduced abundence of sea ice – hardly a response to cooling!
Svenmark has a speculative idea about cosmic rays and cloud cover, but as yet there is very little evidence for its reality. The preliminary results from CERN indicate that any effect of cosmic rays is swamped by ‘contamination’ or existing cloud condensation nuclei of physical particulates and chemical triggers such as sulphur dimethyl compounds from biological sources.
But the major problem with the Svenmark speculation is that it is trying to explain a TREND in temperatures, rising for the last several decades, with a parameter, GRC flux, that shows no significant trend over the same period.
Elizabeth says:
March 21, 2011 at 7:46 pm
…In Canada, their numbers have increased from less than 2 million in the early 1970′s to 9 million in 2010. Not the perspective environmentalists would offer, but increasing population could be an explanation for increased sightings further south. Furthermore, the fact of increasing populations contradicts the assertion that warming is bad for harp seals.
I think you hit the nail on the head there, Elizabeth.
The range of the Harp seal has to extend to less than ideal areas when population pressure causes a shortage of breeding spaces and a lack of food. It is usually the weaker members of the population who get forced out to the periphery as they cannot compete with their peers.
Based on this rationale, the few seals seen in the south have no significance regarding weather/climate and there is no need to invoke the pixie-dust of them having “developed an ability to sense coming changes”. Nature is never as easy to interpret as is often assumed.
The seals migrate following their favorite food.
In Europe during the cold periods seal populations are found as far south as Portugal.
I would agree about the sharks. My Navy boyfriend confirmed that one. Also the orca and polar bears. Plus easy to catch baby seal fur has, in the past, been a necessary component of human survival in ice-age cold weather.
What? You think we can survive wearing cotton when it gets cold?
Beware the Harp Seal Proxy.
Jose
So just to make sure that I get it right – studies show that a significant majority of changes in animal and plant habits are consistent with global warming, but a post about one example, that may not be consistent with the predominance of the data, is just interesting and not an example of cherry-picking.
Ok. Gotcha.
Some time back the sea turtle population was thought to be declining and in danger then they found the sea turtles were at sea and as for the sea turtles, they were probably unaware of the problem they had caused.
Caleb
“The sea bosses you”
Is a lesson I learned when I sailed the Atlantic in 2005. I’d never been sailing before in my life but decided to do 3 months on a boat following the Trades from the Canaries to the Cape Verdes then Barbados. me and my mate and his parents on a 40-foot steel hulled sloop.
2005 as you may recall was when we got to Hurricane Epsilon (and I think one more)
The most common phrase my friends used and that I now use (even though I am not religious or generally superstitious) was “Neptune Willing”
No matter what you do or where you go on the boat…it’s Neptune Willing.
Joshua, the entire population of plants and animals in Wallowa County show the affects of the last 4 years of local cooling (which is primarily cold late Springs, cool Summers, and an early start to Fall freezing temperatures). That includes those that live under the soil. Don’t have to cherry pick.
And if you ask the old timers (note to self, you will not be able to use that phrase soon enough because you will be one of them), when describing the warm spells of yesteryear, they can accurately list what happened as being opposite of what we are experiencing now.
What irritates the helloutofme is that some people dismiss oral histories while taking tree rings as the gospel truth. Maybe the folks in Wallowa County aren’t ethnic enough.
rbateman says:
March 22, 2011 at 2:46 am
” Not only that, Leif, but the GCRs penetrate deeply, and can affect many layers of ice/snow far below the surface, thereby averaging out the data”
GCRs don’t penetrate the atmosphere deep enough to even reach the ice and even if there were no atmosphere in the way they can’t penetrate ice more than a few centimeters. GCR strength is measured by proxy at the surface and in ice cores. On the surface in real-time the proxy is neutron count which are a part of the cascade of particles created by GCR collision with N2 and O2 molecules. The neutrons can reach the surface. In ice cores the proxies are so called cosmogenic radionuclides including Beryllium 13, Carbon 14, and Chlorine 36 which are produced in the upper atmosphere by GCR collisions and find their way into ice cores by being incorporated into snowflakes as the snowflake forms.
The following is worth noting especially for Leif:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation#Galactic_cosmic_rays
Leif appears to be in stage 2 clinical denial of a connection between GCR activity and climate change.
Earth is warming and seals don’t have ESP.
By the way Joshua, do you have a list of flora and fauna that have readily demonstrated to be, and been reported in the literature, sensitive to both longer and shorter term swings in natural weather pattern oscillations? Here’s another related question, how was the PDO accidentally discovered?
Many species of flora and fauna readily demonstrate the powerful cycles of weather pattern oscillations. But they don’t care one iota for smaller changes such as tiny-in-comparison affects of AGW.
However, you seem to be under the impression that sensitivity to weather pattern change is the newest previously unknown thing and devastating to flora and fauna. It isn’t. These cycles have been known for a long time in oral histories and in the peer reviewed literature. What is interesting is that young whippersnapper scientists still wet behind the ears and greener than grass think these cycles have now been disrupted by an incredibly small change in a trace gas, relative to all the other gases present in the atmosphere, and that it is killing the poor little flora and fauna creatures. Relax. It is doing no such thing, as the inhabitants of Earth have learned how to handle the MUCH greater swings of weather pattern oscillations.
Check out:
Salmon
Elk
Bats
Worms
Grasshoppers
I can confirm the sighting of at least one Harp Seal in Corolla, NC, not many miles North of Kitty Hawk, NC, as one was photographed and published in a local blog last month.
See here:
http://eyeondare.blogspot.com/2011/03/laverne-shirley.html
izen says: “There are a number of very silly ideas in this article about evolution and animal behavior. The idea that evolution can develop a predictive sense or have any foresight is nonsense, evolution only responds to present conditions, it cannot make impossible predictions about the future and evolve a capability to respond to that future before it happens.”
I would go so far as to say that anyone that talks about evolution in that way may as well be talking about intelligent design. There is either a specific design plan, or foresight (which implies a god), or there is random chance. Well, I suppose you could have both intelligent design and randomness, but most people prefer to have just one of them (being the perverse twits that we are). Darwin did have one thing wrong, though. It is not survival of the fittest, it is survival of the luckiest.
Dave Springer says:
March 22, 2011 at 6:58 am
The 80–90 year solar Gleissberg cycles appear to vary in length depending upon the lengths of the concurrent 11 year solar cycles, and there also appear to be similar climate patterns occurring on this time scale.
Figure 13 of http://www.leif.org/research/Eddy-Symp-Poster-2.pdf shows little if any similar patterns.