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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Animals like it warm to have sex, especially the female gender. Personal experience only, sample of one, experiment run multiple times. Robust analysis though.
The generalization of plankton seems a bit self-serving. Specific species have adaptations to the local environment. An arctic species is not going to do well in the Indian Ocean, but within the range of their comfort zone a higher temperature is going to increase egg development time / live birth time, and time to maturity. With this in mind wouldn’t the real question be ” Is the food source for these critters adequate to provide for the increase in numbers “. All populations have limiting factors. With these guys I would have to assume heat/ cold/ predation/ food supply. I am not an expert in plankton but I am sure there are some species that have a much greater range of temperature variability. Without reference to any other limiting factor a slight increase in temperature should increase the total biomass of plankton. I don’t see this as a bad thing. Whales get hungry to.
Jeff
RockyRoad says: @ur momisugly September 27, 2011 at 10:50 am
“There’s some that figure dinosaurs were warm-blooded. This is talking about cold-blooded animals, hence the probable difference”
But that should make it all the worse given transport of heat to the external environment.
I would hazard a guess at more offspring live causing a decline in the amount of food. All other things being equal food availability will have a major impact on the size of an animal.
See the increase in height of the Japanese after WWII
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/takemi/files/RP245.pdf
http://www.sumitomo.gr.jp/english/discoveries/special/84_01.html
Since the advent of air conditioning Americans have spent much less time in warm air; our ‘personal degree-days’ are much lower than before. And sure enough, we’ve grown fat and immature in the last three decades!
Maybe this result makes sense after all.
I know a Samoan-College football player. hands so large they have they have their own internal
organs. I’m, sorry this is a Bravo Sierra study..
Leap of faith: Oceans might be getting warmer (sub-leap: “in a warming world”).
Leap of faith: This could mean smaller whatsits.
Leap of faith: This “could have important consequences for individual species and ecosystems”
Leap of faith: It “could have profound implications for understanding how organisms work, and impact on entire food webs and the world’s ecosystems”
It could be worse than we may be thinking!
Scientists no longer have to measure stuff. Just take leaps of faith (and convince the government funding agencies to take them too).
Well now, fish are coldblooded and if I expect to catch a record largemouth bass I better head to Florida or Alabama or other parts south. I won’t break the record in Michigan. Same for catfish – the largest are in Spain, Vietnam, the Congo, etc.
I’ll have to re-read the article and see what constraints they’ve put on their findings.
Tim Clark says:
September 27, 2011 at 11:19 am
“Animals like it warm to have sex, especially the female gender. Personal experience only, sample of one, experiment run multiple times. Robust analysis though.”
When will you publish?
It’s ‘ALLEGED’ global warming. (After all, that’s what we have to call even the obviously guilty.)
This Warmista catch-phrase has no scientific meaning except when every temperature in the world rises by exactly the same amount. Worse yet, it is well known there is no global temperature, since the term is just a meaningless, thermodynamically arbitrary statistical calculation done incompetantly over a database rife with inaccuracy and maladjustment.
There isn’t even a metric for ‘climate change’, one of the most vague and nebulous pseudo-scientific terms ever propounded.
How much longer do we have to endure these rent-seeking swarms of cargo-cult propagandists with their endlessly repeated mystical chants? They probably need spell-check every time they try to type ‘anthropogenic’, when actually ‘anthropomorphic’ would be more like it, designating the erroneous projection of human qualities, in this case upon ‘the planet’.
So if warming of 0.8 C in a century has such a detrimental de-coupling effect on those copepods, how come they made it through the millions of years when it was much warmer than today?
Reading such interpretations, i cannot help but wonder if the researchers ever attended just a couple of lectures on geological timescales and evolution. Invertebrates especially have been around for a very long time indeed, surviving climatic upheavals and the effects of plate tectonics.
So the extreme warming of 0.8 C per century are now totally catastrophic for them? A likely story.
I read “How global warming could cause animals to shrink” and gave up! the comments are good tho! 🙂
Any hunter knows that game animals become larger as their habitat moves further North! …and for a simple reason: larger mass is required to produce more heat to stay alive in colder temperatures! What a bunch of dumb bunnies! Did one of them ever walk outdoors?
Of course the dinosaurs were warm blooded: a four-chambered fossilized heart and feathers convinced all but the most irrationally precommitted diehards. So were the ancestors of crocodiles. So were the ancestors of all cold blooded critters–most evolution has taken place in a very warm environment. In fact your body temperature approximately preserves that of the primeval ambient in which your physiology evolved. Ectotherms are thermodynamic specialists–they have survived by escaping the high metabolic rat race. The primary, unstable stock from which just about all lineages are derived are the fastest and most ferocious predators with the highest metabolisms, nicely represented by the toothy amphibians of the carboniferous. –AGF
And he is a “Dr”? (Dr Andrew Hirst)…
[snip – uncalled for – Anthony]
@ur momisugly Gail Combs
North of 60 degree, the mosquitoes are like condors (and also keeping biting to about 40F), the massive horseflies affect compasses, and 15 lb lake trout are used as bait.
I don’t think the dinosaurs got their memo.
Now I know why pythons only get to 30 feet long in jungles. It is the heat that has reduced thier size. I wonder if this applies to salt water crocs as well?
Certain part of me definitely shrinks in cold water.
*nods*
“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. ”
So there is a paper that shows how this occurs? Not a correlation, a mechanism?
That would be interesting and an important discovery.
“show conclusively how it occurs” those are serious words used by the best science and the worst charlitans. It should be immediately obvious upon browsing the paper.
Copepod to lady copepod: “I was in the pool!!!”
Since these pseudoscientists need to publish to keep their gravy trains going, and will write anything, however inane, into which they can insert the magic words “climate change,” “global warming,” “climate disruption,” etc., thus guaranteeing publication, such articles should now be featured under their own literary genres, of which the possibilities are endless.
It has been rumored by somebody somewhere that manmade global warming may cause breast, testicle, and penis enlargement on unprecedented scales. I know this for a fact, because I started the rumor. The AGW crowd can now use it for future articles, and cite me as a reference.
I guess this work was done in the lab. In the sea, some copepods are known to migrate vertically. At night, they’re in the top layer of the sea; in the daytime, down around about 100m.
The temperature difference of this daily migration is not insignificant.
But you can’t blame the authors. Grants may be shackled to work on AGW these days.
Oh dear – as a graduate (astrophysics) from QMC I hang my head in shame at this kind of drivel…
Mark
We’ve been told that global warming causes giant ants, plagues of giant locusts, bees, birds, the whole gamut….
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2011/05/04/how-global-warming-caused-the-attack-of-the-giant-ants/
Steve says:
September 27, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Copepod to lady copepod: “I was in the pool!!!”
LOL!!!! Awesome Steve.
My thoughts were… dang, there goes that Medieval and Permiam warm periods again. I knew they would find a way to get rid of them once and for all. That explains why those dinosaurs were so .. wait.. they were large weren’t they? And, they got larger once the CO2 and temperature increased which resulted in more available biomass, right?