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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Kevin asks what seals taste like.
I read that seal meat is on the menu of the restaurant in Canada’s parliament, an easier way to try it than going north to where Inuit villagers served raw seal meat to Canada’s former Governor-General (an experience different from where she grew up – Haiti, though most in that dysfunctional society are poor enough to eat regardless of taste) and Canada’s Prime Minister.
As for touks/toques, I have a green one from the Boston hockey team. Do you think that would let me migrate through the Great Bar Lev Line? 😉
Andrew30 says: March 21, 2011 at 6:22 pm
“species do not ‘develop’ to survive, they develop IF they survive.”
That too is a confusing way of trying to say something.
Logically, those individual creatures that have some ability/attribute are more likely to survive thus reproduce more individual creatures with that attribute.
How do they get the ability/attribute? Possibilities include:
– genetic mutation
– trying something different (to survive, such as different food source or more sheltering location), then passing that on to their offspring
In the second case, the knowledge might be instinctive in the offspring, or by education (as adult creatures do teach their young, such as how to hunt).
They are of course far from human abilities, but very attuned to survival factors especially food.
But I say it appears that creatures vary in their willingness to try something different. Even gray whales, most of whom unwisely feed only in one area of the ocean that sometimes is blocked by ice, are trying different things – one showed up in the harbour of Vancouver B.C., one spring when herring were plentiful. That’s way off the normal migration route, though whales don’t exactly broadcast their location (humans only know where some are because they happen to have seen them surfacing to breath – it’s a big ocean). OTOH, perhaps the individual got dis-oriented and swam up the Strait of Juan de Fuca – the test will be whether it and others return.
Thankyou Ira Glickstein for your points on the subject, though I object to the word “predict”, perhaps you mean they are reacting to climate variation affecting their life before many humans appreciate what is happening. (For which several theories have been posted herein, such as less ice in a region due changes in AO, and over-population (which may be due to changes in fish population (what is the cod population these days?).)
And I see Andrew30 explaining that he used a word more narrowly than most people would, “develop”.
(The subject of evolution or whatever should be a thread on its own, to reduce size of this one.)
Others in this thread make good points about being sure of identification of seals, and that perhaps the reporters are not aware of past sightings.
Isn’t it kind of obvious that:
Less ice along the Labrador coast -> less breeding/wintering habitat for harp seals -> an increase in the (small) fraction of harp seals who swim/drift further afield than normal.
I see izen upthread also mentioned this, and Elizabeth mentioned the partial recovery of the seal population from the hunting-induced low point in the 70s.
OH NO! attack of the psychic seals!
To the author
“The point I was making is that Harp Seals have lived pretty much as Pagophilus groenlandicus for many, many more climate change cycles than humans as Homo sapiens. While we were evolving from living in caves and huts to houses and high-rises, they were still flipping around in their seal skins, much as they do today. ”
This point doesn’t work, for pretty evident reasons. You are treating Harp seals as an evolutionary end-point, and Homo Sapiens as a species within within an evolutionary process. You apparently believe that traits granted by evolution will express themselves whilst evolution moves slowly, but hide themselves when evolution moves quicker. It’s a frankly bizarre understanding of evolutionary science.
And we’re still waiting on the explanation of how seals can develop a psychic ability to predict a climate system which is still subject to events which haven’t happened yet.
Ultimately, there is still absolutely no reason why the seals should have developed climatic precognition whilst humans didn’t. And this post still remains in the category of new-age speculation until these questions are answered.
I can’t bear it any longer… is it time to call ‘April Fool’s’?
There is a good discussion of learning in “Volition as Cognitive Self-Regulation” by Harry Binswanger, in the December 1991 issue of “Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes”.
“An animal that is sensorially aware of its environment is able to learn what to persue and what to avoid, under the guidance of pleasure and pain – natural selection having acted to coordinate the pleasure-pain mechanism with the demands of survival. Animal behaviour regulated by consciousness can be adapted to survival within the animal’s own life span.” He then suggests that consciously regulated behaviour allows for finer discrimination among varied environmental features than instincts can – giving the being greater range and flexibility of behaviour.
So his claim is that animals lower on the evolutionary scale than human do have the ability to learn on their own, which facilitates adaptation. (Humans of course have a conceptual faculty, which is a powerful higher order capability.)
Animals do make mistakes of course, they die because they usually aren’t rescued from their error as we do so often with humans.
Seeing the big picture helps – I once saw beavers construct a dam in a stream but there were too few trees around for viability. Their next choice of location was a watercourse too wide to be viable if unusually high runoff occurred. In between looked to me like a far better location.