We’ve already had a “climate craziness of the week” so I’ll just file this bit of blather under another category. First, this article in The Independent, which aims to scare the children.
Now here’s the press release from the University of Bristol. Note the simplistic experiment, followed by broad disclaimers about it, emphasis mine.
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Ocean acidification leaves clownfish deaf to predators
Press release issued 1 June 2011
Baby clownfish use hearing to detect and avoid predator-rich coral reefs during the daytime, but new research from the University of Bristol demonstrates that ocean acidification could threaten this crucial behaviour within the next few decades.
Since the Industrial Revolution, over half of all the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by the ocean, making pH drop faster than any time in the last 650,000 years and resulting in ocean acidification. Recent studies have shown that this causes fish to lose their sense of smell, but a new study published today in Biology Letters shows that fish hearing is also compromised.
Working with Professor Philip Munday at James Cook University, lead author Dr Steve Simpson of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol reared larvae straight from hatching in different CO2 environments.
“We kept some of the baby clownfish in today’s conditions, bubbling in air, and then had three other treatments where we added extra CO2 based on the predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for 2050 and 2100,” Dr Simpson said.
After 17-20 days rearing, Dr Simpson monitored the response of his juvenile clownfish to the sounds of a predator-rich coral reef, consisting of noises produced by crustaceans and fish.
“We designed a totally new kind of experimental choice chamber that allowed us to play reef noise through an underwater speaker to fish in the lab, and watch how they responded,” Dr Simpson continued. “Fish reared in today’s conditions swam away from the predator noise, but those reared in the CO2 conditions of 2050 and 2100 showed no response.”
This study demonstrates that ocean acidification not only affects external sensory systems, but also those inside the body of the fish. The ears of fish are buried deep in the back of their heads, suggesting lowered pH conditions may have a profound impact on the entire functioning of the sensory system.
The ability of fish to adapt to rapidly changing conditions is not known. Dr Simpson said: “What we have done here is to put today’s fish in tomorrow’s environment, and the effects are potentially devastating. What we don’t know is whether, in the next few generations, fish can adapt and tolerate ocean acidification. This is a one-way experiment on a global scale, and predicting the outcomes and interactions is a major challenge for the scientific community.”
The work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council UK (Simpson) and the Australian Research Council (Munday).
Paper
‘Ocean acidification erodes crucial auditory behaviour in a marine fish’ by Steve Simpson, Philip Munday, Matt Wittenrich, Rachel Manassa, Danielle Dixson, Monica Gagliano and Hong Yan in Biology Letters.
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Translation: “we put the fish in a significantly different water environment, and they reacted differently”. Anyone who has ever owned a freshwater or saltwater aquarium can tell you about what happens when you transfer fish from the water environment they are used to, to one they aren’t. pH shock and Osmotic shock often often result from the abrupt change. The key is abrupt change, whether embryo or adult, the fish are wired for a specific ocean environment, change that environment abruptly and the fish change too. What they’ve done here is take 40 years of gradual change and compress it to the here and now.
And I have to think, these guys chose the absolute worst fish for the experiment, because I’m betting they didn’t go out and get wild embryos, but rather took the easy path of tank raised clown fish embryos. From Wikipedia:
Clownfish are now reared in captivity by a handful of marine ornamental farms in the USA. Clownfish were the first species of Saltwater fish to successfully be Tank-raised. Tank-raised fish are a better choice for aquarist, because wild-caught fish are more likely to die soon after purchasing them due to the stress of capture and shipping. Also, tank-bred fish are usually more disease resistant and in general are less affected by stress when introduced to the aquarium. Captive bred clownfishes may not have the same instinctual behavior to live in an anemone. They may have to be coaxed into finding the anemone by the home aquarist. Even then, there is no guarantee that the anemone will host the clownfish.
The “may not have the same instinctual behavior to live in an anemone.” is troubling. It suggests that tank raised clownfish may not be “normal”. And of course when I backtrack to the source method (from the Simpson paper) for obtaining embryos (Munday et al, 2008, referenced in the current paper) I find this:
Clownfish were reared at James Cook University’s experimental aquarium facility where the pH of unmanipulated seawater was 8.15 ± 0.07. This is similar to the pH that pelagic larvae would experience during development in the open ocean (1).
James Cook University in Townsville QLD has direct access to the ocean, so it would seem right that they have direct access to “unmanipulated seawater”. Still, they were tank raised, and that’s a different environment than the ocean and their wild cousins.
Let’s have a look at the paper.
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Ocean acidification erodes crucial auditory behaviour in a marine fish
Abstract
Ocean acidification is predicted to affect marine ecosystems in many ways, including modification of fish behaviour. Previous studies have identified effects of CO2-enriched conditions on the sensory behaviour of fishes, including the loss of natural responses to odours resulting in ecologically deleterious decisions. Many fishes also rely on hearing for orientation, habitat selection, predator avoidance and communication. We used an auditory choice chamber to study the influence of CO2-enriched conditions on directional responses of juvenile clownfish (Amphiprion percula) to daytime reef noise. Rearing and test conditions were based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions for the twenty-first century: current-day ambient, 600, 700 and 900 µatm pCO2. Juveniles from ambient CO2-conditions significantly avoided the reef noise, as expected, but this behaviour was absent in juveniles from CO2-enriched conditions. This study provides, to our knowledge, the first evidence that ocean acidification affects the auditory response of fishes, with potentially detrimental impacts on early survival.
- Received March 14, 2011.
- Accepted May 10, 2011.
- This Journal is © 2011 The Royal Society
Full paper here
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First, note the time-line; it was fast tracked. It went from submission to approval in two months. It seems that according to this journal statement, they go for “fast track science” as a matter of policy:
Articles submitted to Biology Letters benefit from its broad scope and readership, dedicated media promotion and we aim for a turnaround time of within 4 weeks to first decision.
Looks like a paper mill to me.
And, this may indicate the paper was chosen on something other than scientific merit, emphasis mine:
Selection Publishing Criteria
The criteria for acceptance are: scientific excellence, work of outstanding quality and international importance, originality and interest across disciplines within biology. To be acceptable for publication a paper should represent a significant advance in its field, rather than something incremental.
All manuscripts are assessed by a member of the Editorial Board, who advises the Handling Editor on the suitability of the manuscript for Biology Letters. Based on this, the Handling Editor decides whether the paper should be rejected or sent for full peer-review. Many good papers are rejected at this stage on the grounds that they are insufficiently novel, due to high competition for space.
So, “novelty” is primary acceptance criteria and peer review is on a 4 week fast track. Check.
It seems volume of peer review is celebrated at this journal. That’s something I’ve never seen before in any other journal.
What really seems to be missing from this clownfish experiment is a control experiment. For example, did they test the fish by putting them in water that represents the CO2/ ocean environment of 10-40 years ago? I seems they only tested for the future representing 600, 700 and 900 µatm pCO2. Here’s what they say about the method:
The CO2-conditions of our rearing and test environments were current-day ambient (∼390 µatm), and elevated-CO2 treatments (approx. 600, 700 and 900 µatm), consistent with the range of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions for CO2 concentrations at the end of the twenty-first century [2].
This is very important, because the paper assumes that only an increase of CO2 will change clownfish behavior. Did they test for decreasing CO2 levels and what the fish would do then? Apparently not, and that basic use of a control seemed to have escaped those high volume peer reviewers racing to meet the 4 week deadline.
By not testing for a decreased CO2 situation, they invalidate their own premise. And that’s on top of the fact that they aren’t using wild clownfish embryos and they are making abrupt changes in the water chemistry that generations of the fish have not experienced and doing it only in one direction, up.
This is high school science stuff guys. I wait for an explanation as to why you didn’t test for a decrease to CO2 and the resultant pH on clownfish embryos.
So I wonder, if we take 10 peer reviewers from the “wilds” of science, put them in a think tank, increase the ambient CO2 levels to more than double they are used to, and then tell them they have 4 weeks to review 100 papers, will they still produce good science?
Maybe they need more peer reviewers in that clown car to be sure.
ferd berple says:
June 4, 2011 at 10:46 am
From the same source:
Ph 7 is neutral. So, even if CO2 levels were to reach 2000 ppm, something that will take hundreds of years at rpesent rates, the ocean will STILL BE CAUSTIC.
This is a very important point. “acidification” is another misnomer like “carbon” and “Warming”. Also, it is SURFACE “decaustification”…note that the entire ocean is not being “acidified”. But the word “surface” is quicly dropped from all discussions, so as to amplify the impact of “Ocean”. Implying that a trace of CO2 is capapable of not only acidfying, but doing so to the entire water column. And notice that “climate change” is not mentioned in “acidifcation” scare terms. It’s just the “carbon”.
Listening to the likes of Dr. Suzuki speaking about ocean acidifation, it sounds like a horrible catastrophe…which ignores the ocean’s enormous buffering capability. “Surface acidifcation” would be dissipated by wave action, and completely erased by storm mixing. Basically, and astoundingly trite scare with all the credibility of a grocery-store check-out rag. It is indeed ironic that the clownfish (Nemo-cute) is selected as the control.
Anthony: Referees are often thanked by their journals because they aren’t paid, and, it takes a lot of time. I just went to a dinner where they called out referees and thanked them for being top producers. It’s not a mark of a bad journal, rather a quite normal journal.
REPLY: I’m not saying thanking referees is a bad thing, only that I’ve never seen a “top reviewers” page. It reminds me of the “top producers” page we see on real estate websites. Given the fast track, I doubt peer review at Biology Letters is extensive nor difficult. It seems more like rubber stamping to me. – Anthony
But wait! What if there’s a quantum effect going on here? What if the mere observation of clownfish hearing turns the fish into deaf mutes (not sure how talkative clownfish may be in the first place). The greenies may be deafening our clownfish!
Keith W – I guess one could say that CO2 might make the fish smarter, so they don’t run away just because of a silly sound…
I can see the cartoon.
One clownfish in a tank nudges another and says “the human is back.”
The second fish says “he’s just another AGW nutter, ignore him.”
Colder water dissolves and holds more CO2 than warmer water. If the CO2 increase is causing global warming, then the ocean water temperatures will increase too, causing a proportionally smaller amount of CO2 to be dissolved and_ raising_ the pH. If these researchers simply acidified water using some sort of CO2 reactor, rather than place the fish tank in a room that has more CO2 in the air and a higher temperature, then they are creating conditions that are not reflecting the expected climate where both air CO2 content and temperature are higher.
Partial pressure of carbon dioxide in living tissue is an order of magnitude or two higher than environmental partial pressure. As bones, including fish earbones grow inside the body, this study can’t be anything but crap.
“Nemo . . . Nemo . . . NEMO!!!! I wonder why that boy never listens?”
😉
Looking at this Wiki, and curious about historic CO2 cycles, you can see graphs of CO2 measurements derived from ice cores, and from other sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
Look at this graph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Note that the present day is to the left on the graph, and note that historically, CO2 levels were MUCH higher than they are today
It would seem to me that most of our marine life actually evolved on the earth when CO2 levels were much higher than they are today…
Chris Shaker
Its not just the fish that are clowns!!
How Dangerous is Chicken Little of the Sea to poor little Nemo?
Ocean acidification can only occur if Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC) is rising faster than Total Alkalinity (TA). This nomogram demonstrates the relationship of TA & DIC to pH…
TA vs. DIC and pH (Zeebe and Wolf-Gladrow)
According to Dore et al., 2009, “Over the past 250 years, the mean pH of the surface global ocean has decreased from ≈8.2 to 8.1… This acidification of the sea is driven by the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration, which results from fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, and other human activities. Models predict that surface ocean pH may decline by an additional 0.3–0.4 during the 21st century”… A total pH decline of 0.4 to 0.5 (8.2 to 7.7 or 7.6).
I used a linear regression to estimate TA and DIC at ~275 and ~550 ppmv…
TA & DIC vs. Atmospheric CO2, extrapolated back to 275 and forward to 550 ppmv
If I plot their in situ TA vs in situ DIC and extrapolated it as above (red curve), I get a very strong correlation (R^2=0.72); but I don’t get anything close to a 0.5 to 0.6 pH decline from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels. I get a total decline of 0.16 (8.30 to 8.14) due to a doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels.
Hawaii Ocean Time-series, Station ALOHA: TA vs DIC. Red curve = in situ. Blue curve = Calibrated to salinity of 35
The only way I get a pH decline comparable to 0.4 to 0.5 is when I use the TA and DIC values that were normalized to a salinity of 35 (blue curve). This yields a pH decline of 0.44 (8.40 to 7.96); but it is a horrible correlation (R^2=0.05). TA and DIC are highly correlated to salinity(R^2=0.88, 0.74). DIC has a moderate correlation (R^2=0.39) and TA has a weak correlation (R^2=0.12) to atmospheric CO2. The normalization of TA and DIC to a constant salinity subdues the buffering provided by salinity; while amplifying the acidification effect of increasing CO2. A realistic treatment of salinity, yields an insignificant lowering of pH from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2. Chicken Little of the Sea does not appear to be very dangerous.
Pelejero et al., 2005 demonstrated that the pH of seawater in the vicinity of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) fluctuates on a cycle correlative to the PDO. The oscillation has a period of ~50 years and an amplitude of ~0.3 pH units. The study in question suggests that the total acidification caused by a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 will be less than the amplitude of the natural pH cycle. Nemo has “already been there” and “done that” many times before.
Pelejero et al., 2005, Fig. 1
If Nemo really is deafened by pH fluctuations… How did he survive the natural pH oscillation demonstrated by Pelejero?
AGW Scientists searching for taxpayer money.
Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
Once again we are engaging in a debate based on one of the implicit fallacies that dominate present science. In this case the notion that the conventionally accepted number for mean oceanic pH actually tells us anything about the pH conditions at any random point in space and time anywhere in the oceans. Wooton 2008, which analyzed 10s of thousands of pH measurements collected over an 8 year period and produced the usual alarming decline in pH in their analysis.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/48/18848.full.pdf+html
Like most of the science around this topic, the real news in the data they collected. On the second page of the PDF are two graphs which show the range of values they measured over temporal scales from time of day to the full 8 year length of the study. The range begins at 0.2-0.3 for TOD and grows progressively through each increasing increment until at the full length of the study it reaches 7.5- 9.1. This is for a study area of ocean that is barely larger than a Midwestern hobby farm.
The point is that whatever the mean pH of seawater is doing has as much to do with what’s happening at any particular locality as GISTemp has to do with what’s happening in your backyard. If life in the oceans were as sensitive to minute variations in pH as has been suggested, almost all of it would have disappeared aeons ago.
There are also several works out there which suggest that mean pH, like most every natural phenomenon, varies cyclically over a larger range than is currently being noted, on time scales similar to the major multidecadal oscilllations.
There is worthwhile information in the Supplementary Material document to this paper.
First is the effect of CO2 on the aquarium water from Table S1:
mean pH_____total alkalinity_____pCO2
8.15_________1984___________391_(present day)
7.99_________1992___________613_(IPCC B2)
7.93_________1986___________718_(IPCC A1B)
7.86_________2015___________876_(IPCC A1F1)
Total alkalinity is micromoles/kg. Over the pCO2 range, pH dropped by 0.29 units, while total alkalinity either remained unaffected or even increased slightly. The pH change means the dissolved hydrogen ion concentration nearly doubled, but the water remained alkaline. Mostly what happened is a shift in the dissolved carbonate-bicarbonate equilibrium. But there was also an increase in the total concentration of dissolved CO2, which increased the total concentration of dissolved carbonate.
Notice that even though the pH decreased, the total available alkalinity apparently slightly increased. Typically, this should not have happened if there were only a shift in the carbonate-bicarbonate equilibrium due to more dissolved CO2. So, possibly with increasing CO2, more alkalinity also entered the system. This might occur if the higher dissolved CO2 concentration led to dissolution of metal oxide particulates. There may be a secondary marine-water buffering mechanism on display here.
The authors titrated total alkalinity, but didn’t say to what pH or give repetitions or error bars. So, it might be that all four values are statistically identical, i.e., total alkalinity = 1994(+/-)14= micromoles/kg unchanged and 0.7% experimental error.
Another interesting part of the SI is the test for the effects of increased [CO2] on the fish otolith (calcareous ear-pellet). They did a variety of very nice measurements and found that, “, it appears that CO2 did not significantly modify the growth, size or shape of the otoliths in any consistent way, and there was no relationship between the few identified changes and the elicited behaviour in the choice chambers.”
There was also no change in olfactory apparatus with pCO2 (clownfish pay attention to odor).
So, whatever was going on, the observed difference in auditory-driven behavior was not due to any difficulty in forming calcium carbonate otoliths in a lower pH, higher [CO2], higher bicarbonate environment. The authors had to invoke speculative causes, including difficulties maintaining internal acid-base balance (well-regulated, seems very unlikely), compromised sensory processing (due to decreased alkalinity), or lower-alkalinity-induced stress. These last are all hypotheses that save the results and would require further testing.
Following from Anthony’s discussion of aquarium-bred fish, from the SI: “Clownfish larvae (Amphiprion ephippium), received as eggs from a commercial hatchery (Vince Rado at Oceans, Reefs and AquariumsTM)….” All the fish were from commercial stocks that had been bred to survive under artificial conditions. We don’t know how many generations had been born in captivity, or their selection pressures during breeding. Nor do we know whether the founding stock represented the full genetic diversity of the wild population, or even whether it included the full array of predator-avoidance genes (the progenitor fish were caught, after all).
So, there’s no intrinsic reason to think these fish represented the behavioral repertoire of their wild-type cousins.
Here’s another interesting point from the SI: “The daytime recording of a high quality reef in a marine protected area included both snapping shrimp and multiple sources of fish calls … Although taken outside the natural species range of A. percula, this recording was selected as it had elicited a clear negative response by reef fish larvae in a previous experiment [4]….”
So, the reef sounds to which the clownfish juveniles were exposed were sounds to which their founding stock had had no evolutionary exposure. But anyway other fish had been frightened by those sounds and so they must be valid for clownfish, too.
So the experiment involved farmbred fish removed from their unknown foundational gene array by unknown breeding pressures, and that were exposed to sounds for which they would in any case have had no evolutionary experience.
I looked at reference [4], in which reef fish larvae were shown to avoid the same reef sounds as those used by the authors. The authors offered this as justification for their use of the same recording. But the workers of reference [4] had trapped wild type fish from a reef, and had recorded their reef sounds from a nearby reef. So those fish would have had their full evolutionary grant and were exposed to sounds to which they had evolutionary experience. The reference [4] experiment is hardly comparable at all, and seems to provide no valid justification to the farm-bred clownfish study.
This is also interesting from the SI: “Higher frequency sounds above the hearing range of clownfish were filtered out in Avisoft SASLab Pro (Avisoft Bioacoustics, Berlin, Germany) using a 2 kHz low pass filter (IIR Time Domain, Tschebyscheff 8th order).”
From article reference [4]: “Generally, settlement-stage fish are more attracted to the higher frequency components of reef sound (made predominantly by invertebrates), relative to the original recording and the filtered lower frequencies alone, so sound appears to be more than just a broad indicator of reef location and may provide specific information used in settlement site selection. What is not yet understood is how widespread acoustic cue use is. With the exception of one study carried out on sub-tropical rocky reef fish (Tolimieri et al. 2000), the remaining seven in situ studies that have shown positive phonotactic responses of larval fish to coral reef sound were all carried out at Lizard Island.”
So, the response of larval fish to sounds is not well understood. Are clownfish juveniles sensitive to frequencies beyond strictly auditory detection? Does anyone know? Could filtering out the higher frequencies have handicapped the response of the clownfish? It appears to be not known on how many levels fish respond to acoustic stimuli. Removing the high frequencies certainly adds another variable to the experiment.
In researching this article a bit I found a very nice symposium review on the response of juvenile fish to environmental cues, including auditory and olfactory. It’s J.M. Leis, U. Siebeck, and D.L. Dixson (2011) “How Nemo Finds Home: The Neuroecology of Dispersal and of Population Connectivity in Larvae of Marine Fishes” Integr. Comp. Biol. 1-18 doi: 10.1093/icb/icr004. The abstract is available here. They note that, “A detailed examination of hearing in fishes is presented by Popper et al. (2003) and Higgs et al. (2006), but it is worth noting the caveat of Montgomery et al. (2006) that there may be undiscovered means of hearing.” One would think that under these circumstances, filtering natural sounds as the authors did is ill-advised.
After covering a lot of ground, Leis, et al., end the section on acoustic responses with this wonderful observation: “In the 1990s, when one of us first began to wonder if fish larvae could use sounds from reefs to find appropriate sites for settlement, he was advised by a physiologist to read a text book on fishes in order to find out why this would not be possible. Fish larvae continue to surprise us with their capabilities and the way they do things. We should not let theoretical arguments about the function of sensory systems we do not fully understand deter us from directly investigating just what these little fishes can do. It is clear that we do not yet fully understand how hearing works in fishes, and there may be surprises in store as we try to find out. (bolding added)”
The dismissive comment by the physiologist to go read a standard textbook should ring familiar to those who have expressed skepticism about the projected torrid climate in our future. The great wisdom expressed in that paragraph provides a very large lesson for climate modelers.
Article reference [4] is: Heenan, A., Simpson, S. D. & Braithwaite, V. A. (2009) “Testing the generality of acoustic cue use at settlement in larval coral reef fish” Proceedings of the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium, 554-558.
How did they increase the “acidity” of the water and maintain it “high”? By bubbling CO2 through it?
The poor bugges were probably deaf before the experiment started.
Why only subject the “baby” clownfish to this thuggery?
Don’t they want to know if the adults go deaf too?
Cargo cult science at best.
Thanks, Anthony, interesting find. As someone who has spent a lot of time hanging around under the sea with Nemo, I have to laugh at the idea that you can study the ocean in an aquarium. The ocean has a host of other processes going on that simply don’t exist in an aquarium. Three of these deserve mention–natural swings in pH, buffering reactions, and the effect of life itself.
First, coral reefs are net producers of CO2. Their production varies on a day and night cycle, as with land organisms. As a result, the creatures that live on and around the coral reefs, such as the reef fish like the clown fish, are routinely exposed to much higher levels of dissolved CO2 than indicated in the aquarium. And despite all the dire warnings, this increased CO2 does not seem to bother them.
Second, there are a host of natural buffering reactions in the ocean. Among these are variations in the depth of the lysocline (the depth in the ocean below which the rate of dissolution of calcite increases sharply), as well as changes in the carbonate compensation depth (the depth at which calcite dissolves completely). These variations stabilize and buffer the entire oceanic carbonate system. Because they occur only at the high pressures of great depths, they are not replicated in the aquarium.
Third, the balances of the chemicals in the ocean are not set by the thermodynamic energetics of the chemical reactions involved. Instead, they are set by the life in the ocean. The ocean is a huge “sea of life” in the most literal of senses. And as a result, all kinds of chemical reactions take place in the ocean that would never occur in an aquarium. Life is famous for pushing all kinds of chemical reactions the wrong way. Life has dozens of tricks, enzymes, special methods, that it uses to convince the local chemicals that they should do something other than what they set out to do.
See my previous thread on The Electric Oceanic Acid Test for further discussion of oceanic alkalinity.
So here’s my bon mot for the day — aquariums are to alarmists’ claims about the ocean, what models are to alarmists claims about the climate–an easily manipulated environment where one can speed up the rate at which one produces incorrect answers.
w.
The behavior of tank spawned Clown Fishes is not “natural”. This is a well documented fact that any marine aquarium professional is aware of. The cause is not known. I am also suspecting that any effects noticed, are from environmental change stress and not from environmental stress! And let us not forget that Clown Fish are quite aggressive. The behavior mentioned can be cause by increased aggressiveness. On top of this, about 10 percent of the fry will be “super males”. These are highly aggressive individuals who’s whole meaning in life is to provide targets for predators thus allowing the other fry to escape. Netting out fry will always result in a population biased toward the aggressive.
Have to agree with Willis. How many ‘aberrant’ behaviours of animals in zoos have been observed?
You just can’t equate laboratory conditions with real life ones.
Dr Simpson said: “What we have done here is to put today’s fish in tomorrow’s environment, and the effects are potentially devastating. ”
I bet the predators aren’t devastated. And the clown fish I spoke to said ‘you can’t hear much in this tank becase of the sound of CO2 being bubbled in, it’s quite hypnotic.’
Willis beat me to it and doubtlessly did a much better job. I have a hard time believing that any significant change to ocean pH could be affected by increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 100-200 ppm. The ocean is a gigantic buffer system.
Thanks, Anthony. This poor excuse for science ticks me off, as ocean acidification from carbon dioxide is, in fact, a valid concern versus make-believe scenarios for global warming. In fact, I have publicly stated that acidification is the ONLY scenario of concern.
These idiot advocate/scientists are muddying up real environmental concerns with their bald-faced appeals to the heartstrings of the youth. Acidification from the production of carbonic acid due to atmospheric deposition of fossil carbon dioxide is, it appears, a valid environmental concern.
This link is to an excellent publication on the topic:
http://royalsociety.org/Ocean-acidification-due-to-increasing-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/
The real risk isn’t to the corals, but rather, to the ecosystem of the surface interface, where seawater meets atmosphere and where sunlight can penetrate, stimulating ocean photosynthesis. This “euphotic zone” boundary layer is under assault from many toxic influences, of which carbon dioxide is only one. The combination of carbonic acid buildup with fertilizer runoff, air pollution deposition and other toxic influences seems to be having a measurable impact on the ocean ecosystem.
If we lose the photosynthesis in this layer, we are in a world of hurt, and I find the best studies of this phenomena to be quite compelling and convincing. We are already seeing inhibition of calcifying phytoplankton and other organisms which make up the base of the food web in the ocean.
Sorry to disappoint anyone. For those who truly think CO2 is biologically innocuous, please keep in mind that we warning labels on dry-cleaning bags for a very good reason.
Best, CRS, DrPH, University of Illinois of course.
Willis wrote: “… an easily manipulated environment where one can speed up the rate at which one produces incorrect answers”.
Now that has made my day! 🙂 Thanks.
I am ashamed to be English. I have been ashamed for years. I hope I won’t be ashamed for too much longer. I never used to be ashamed.
Revolution now please.