Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In the New York Times, there’s an article on some research that suggest a slight shrinkage of plants and animals with warming. In the “you can’t make this up” department, here’s the illustration:
Figure 1. A big frog collected a while ago and a small frog collected more recently, which clearly proves that the frog on the left is larger than the frog on the right
The idea that creatures shrink in warmer climates seems at odds with the giant dragonflies and the dinosaurs and the like that lived when it was somewhat warmer than now. But that’s not the reason I brought this up. The beauty is in the press release.
First, the lead researcher is quoted as saying:
They cautioned that it was too early to make detailed predictions. “Things start falling apart as we try to make generalizations and impose more levels and hierarchies into our hypotheses,” Dr. Bickford said.
OK, that seems sound. Then the hyperventilating begins:
If all animals were to engage in coordinated shrinking it might not be so bad, the researchers speculate. But if, say, mice are shrinking faster than snakes, the snakes may not be able to capture enough of the mice to meet their energy requirements.
So we’re already off on the ship of speculation, miniature mice and “uncoordinated shrinking”. Reuters picks up the story, with Bickford again quoted:
“We have not seen large-scale effects yet, but as temperatures change even more, these changes in body size might become much more pronounced – even having impacts for food security.”
One supposes that they thought that wasn’t scary enough. Here’s the real capper:
“Impacts could range from food resources becoming more limited (less food produced on the same amount of land) to wholesale biodiversity loss and eventual catastrophic cascades of ecosystem services.”
So it’s too early to make detailed predictions, they’ve never seen this in nature, only in the lab … but they are willing to predict the changes might impact food security, make snakes chase smaller mice, limit food resources, cause wholesale biodiversity loss, and at the end of the day, they break out the big guns, it might end up in, wait for it, catastrophic loss of entire ecosystems …
But it’s too early to make predictions.
This reminds me of a headline I once saw in the “National Enquirer”, an American tabloid newspaper. The big print said
Two Headed Boy Found In Jungle!
Not satisfied with the impact of that, they had added a smaller sub-headline that said
Raised By Wolves Until 14!
But that still didn’t have the punch they wanted, so a sub-sub-head was added that said
Mother Teresa Rushes To Investigate!
These kinds of claims, that it’s too soon to tell but it might cause total ecosystems to crash, should be called “Enquirer Science.” Here’s my submission for the first headline:
Two Sizes Of Frogs Found In Jungle!
Clear Signal of Future Ecosystem Collapse!
Well-Funded Scientist Rushes To Investigate!
w.
[UPDATE] A reader pointed to the Daily Telegraph, which has this:
Animals ‘shrinking’ due to climate change
Polar bears are shrinking because of the impact of climate change on their natural habitats, along with many other animals and plants, researchers say.
Figure 2. Obligatory polar bear picture. Two thirds of the worlds polar bears could be lost in fifty years. I thought they had a better sense of direction than that.
I must confess, I find the idea of leetle teeny polar bears quite appealing …
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I’ve updated the head post. Enjoy.
w.
Perhaps, dare we to hope, environmentalists will shrink disproportionately until, like the Cheshire Cat, nothing left but their grin.
Hmmm….
1.Male frogs are smaller than female frogs. The same is true of Toads and most amphibians.
2.Shrinkage in species is related to two factors in the environment; lack of food (smaller animals don’t eat as much) or over predation, larger animals are easier to catch.
3.This article is nonsensical; any one could go into the field and collect specimens of various sizes, put them next to a suitable metric ruler (metric rulers convey that ‘scientific’ feel) and proclaim “salamanders in Borneo are growing at an unprecedented rate!” etc.
(only the last bit of 3 is /sarc)
Funny that you never see a photo of a polar bear covered in baby seal blood. They’re always sitting at the precipice of a legde of ice, perilously close to the water. If only they were one of natures greatest swimmers, they might just be able to survive, but alas…
It seems we’re all doomed to have the extreme lack of biodiversity found in the tropical regions, and not the lush tundras of the north. Sometime next week we’ll be halfway between here and some hybrid Venus/Mars, did you know they both have the demon gas too? It’s invaded all the inner planets and erased all traces of life on them, and we’re next!
I have a cunning plan though, we’ll indoctrinate the children and humourously threaten to murder anyone who deviates in any way, then all get those tax dollars to work at meetings in one of those threatened tropical paradises where we can discuss how to raise more taxes and get the banks on board. If that doesn’t change the planet’s temperature, well at least we did the right thing by raising taxes and concentrating more wealth into the hands of billionaires.
I’m so proud to be an Australian right now! We’re pouring in at least a trillion dollars to save the planet via bankers, when will you do your part?
Willis wrote: …..It would be cooler with frogs, though …
So increasing the world’s population of frogs will halt runaway global warming in its tracks? Now there’s a thesis.
The Philip Dick story with the title of this post describes an argument between two scientists who don’t like each other particularly well if I remember correctly… Nice allusion.
Oh my, not only are they smaller but it looks like they are changing color as well! We’re all doomed.
I think these are members of Dicroglossidae, not Ranidae. They might be Hylarana picturata, the Malaysian spotted stream frog; the only problem with that is this frog is a lowlands frog, inhabiting streams, ponds, marshy lowlands and caves. It is very popular in the pet trade, however.
Appears as if the global warming so far has succeded in shrinking at least a few brains.
Isn’t it already a degree warmer than two centuries ago?
So why aren’t all the animals already shrunken?
First of all we need to know which frog it is, the article neglected to include that detail, which is quite odd considering the poor thing has lost a third of it’s body size in just 20 years or so. Then we need to know the ages of the two frogs.
Link to Mount Kinabalu frogs, Is the incredible shrinking frog one of these?
http://www.nickgarbutt.com/photo-galleries/borneo-and-se-asia/frogs?OBJECTID=658D85E0-FBBC-11DD-BF780030487DBF75&page=2
Willis, Anthony, and crew, how do you discover all the nonsense that is produced by the ‘titled’ idiots. Is the title Dr. becoming short for Dumb reasoning in academia?
KPO says:
October 19, 2011 at 2:30 am
“If the adaptation is so quick, then the frogs have the ability to adapt to local variations in short time, be it bigger or smaller depending on local conditions.”
Theoretically such a quick adaption could be due to epigenetic activation of pre-existing genes, changing the methylation pattern. But this would mean that the species is already prepared for such changes, so no threat to survival; just an adaptation to something that happened in the past before – during the MWP, for instance, and many times before that. This would be another proof that the current warming is nothing unprecedented, so the incredible shrinking frogs could be interesting for the AGW-skeptic position. Just check for changes in the methylation pattern, and try to reverse them in a breeding experiment in a lab setting.
And the male frog on the left is 5 years old and the male frog on the right is 1 year old.
Harry
It is actually true that (most) animal tend to grow larger in a cold climate. This has been well known since the nineteenth century (at least 1847) and is known as “Bergmann’s rule” for the german zoologist who was first to describe the phenomenon. It seems to be most reliable for endotherms (mammals and birds) and for large animals. In some mammals the effect is so pronounced that it is possible to date fossils to glacials or interglacials on size alone.
There are however many exceptions (it does not seem to apply to animals living on small islands for example), and it certainly does not apply to plants (which on the whole tend to grow larger in warmer climates).
Please note that this does not mean that there are no large animals in warm climates, nor that biomass decreases with rising temperatures!
As for any catastrophic effect, this is something happens during every glacial cycle without any noticeable ecologic effect.
The large size of some ectotherms (particularly insects) during past geologic epochs was more probably due to more oxygen in the air rather than higher temperatures. The insects have a rather primitive respiratory/circulatory system that does not work well except for small bodies.
“If all animals were to engage in coordinated shrinking it might not be so bad, the researchers speculate. But if, say, mice are shrinking faster than snakes, the snakes may not be able to capture enough of the mice to meet their energy requirements.”
What surprises me is the complete lack of ability to understand the prey/predator relationship between the two. Does this particular scientist picture a bunch of fat snakes withdrawing to the smoking room after unwittingly eating the last of the mice?
omnologos said on October 19, 2011 at 2:17 am:
Bat Boy is still appearing at Weekly World News, “The World’s Only Reliable News”, where he’s always been afaik. They “transitioned” from being a dead tree periodical to being all-online.
Top headlines:
Confirmed: World will end October 21, 2011.
Obama on new dollar bill. (Closing line: FYI: The Obama dollar will reportedly be worth $0.47.)
Strange, I thought currency only featured, as the slang term for it goes, “dead Presidents.”
Obama’s teleprompter stolen!
Other less-entertaining news pieces said the podium and Presidential Seals also vanished, but all were recovered later, found abandoned.
Uh-oh, could cunning terrorists have hidden small explosives in the gear and are planning on blowing up the POTUS on the 21st?
Nah, the stuff was probably stolen by some college kids on a dare, taking a break from thinking about attending an “Occupy” protest. And they hacked the software of the TOTUS to randomly display “Allah Akbar” or something similar that he’ll read without thinking. No biggie, nothing new there.
Oh look! Now on sale, Bat Boy Bobble Heads! Wow, Christmas shopping is getting easier this year.
😉
I know people in families with with great differences in height and weight could this be caused
by climate change? Apologies for this just trying to emulate the stupidity of the article.
OK, how about putting a photo of an average Norwegian side by side with an average Malaysian. The average Norwegian (from a much colder climate) is much bigger. Please can I have some money to investigate the climate change implications?
When they said two thirds of polar bears might be lost in the next 50 years it never occurred to me that they meant two thirds would be lost from EACH BEAR! I obviously need to read this stuff more carefully.
More seriously bears live surrounded by water and ice. Indeed they spend a lot of time in water that is full of ice. I wouldn’t think there would be too much temperature variation in that environment unless they somehow changed the freezing point of water somehow when I wasn’t looking.
I also would have thought other changes in their environment likely to have had a greater impact on size. Humans have always been their greatest predators, but only recently have we started hunting them with rifles, a method where big bears no longer have an advantage over small bears in terms of their chance of escape. Furthermore their main food source, seals, suffered a massive decline in abundance in the mid 20th century and has not yet recovered to its previous level. Smaller bears needing less food may well be favoured in a seal scarce environment.
zac says:
October 19, 2011 at 3:11 am
First of all we need to know which frog it is, the article neglected to include that detail, which is quite odd considering the poor thing has lost a third of it’s body size in just 20 years or so. Then we need to know the ages of the two frogs.
I think we need to know the SEX of the two frogs, actually: male frogs are 1/3rd the size of females. I am fairly sure they are both Hylarana picturata, although the colouring difference indicates they may be from different regions.
Readit, readit.
Is it a trick of the light or is the colouring different? The smaller appears to have blue bands which could mean its a different type of frog or something.
The blog on the article linked to has the answer in the comments I think, that they don’t understand what they’re seeing when they raise the temps for fish – post 19 from W.A.Spitzer: “There needs to be a better explanation here. The trout in the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park have been well studied. The trout living in the warmer water nearer to the geysers have become adapted; they grow faster and are larger in size. Further, it seems to me that I have read that in general, the same species of fish living in warmer waters tend to grow faster and are bigger.”
I just wondered.
Is it at all possible [ and I’m prepared to be called out for monumental stupidity here ] but
could it be that the frog on the left is older than the frog on the right ?
No – I’m sorry, I know now that the two frogs are the same age,
despite being separated by three years.
My how the time flies!
N
I haven’t really got the time to look in any detail but the elephant in the room is the temperature at Mount Kinabalu from the 80’s to 2008, as this is an article on global warming right causing animals to shrink right?
So I had a quick check of the mean October temperatures at Sandakan between 1985 (27C) and 2008(27.4) and there was no noticeable warming, I then jumped around to April 1985 (28C) and April 2008 (27.6) again no noticeable warming I haven’t checked any of the other months though.
http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/Sandakan/964910.htm