From Yale University: Fish of Antarctica threatened by climate change
A Yale-led study of the evolutionary history of Antarctic fish and their “anti-freeze” proteins illustrates how tens of millions of years ago a lineage of fish adapted to newly formed polar conditions – and how today they are endangered by a rapid rise in ocean temperatures.
“A rise of 2 degrees centigrade of water temperature will likely have a devastating impact on this Antarctic fish lineage, which is so well adapted to water at freezing temperatures,” said Thomas Near, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of the study published online the week of Feb. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The successful origin and diversification into 100 species of fish, collectively called notothenioids, is a textbook case of how evolution operates. A period of rapid cooling led to mass extinction of fish acclimated to a warmer Southern Ocean. The acquisition of so-called antifreeze glycoproteins enabled notothenioids to survive in seas with frigid temperatures. As they adapted to vacant ecological niches, new species of notothenioids arose and contributed to the rich biodiversity of marine life found today in the waters of Antarctica.
Notothenioids account for the bulk of the fish diversity and are a major food source for larger predators, including penguins, toothed whales, and seals. Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History has one of the most important collections of these specimens in the world.
However, the new study suggests the acquisition of the antifreeze glycoproteins 22 to 42 million years ago was not the only reason for the successful adaptation of the Antarctic notothenioids. The largest radiation of notothenioid fish species into new habitats occurred at least 10 million years after the first appearance of glycoproteins, the study found.
“The evolution of antifreeze was often thought of as a ‘smoking gun,’ triggering the diversification of these fishes, but we found evidence that this adaptive radiation is not linked to a single trait, but to a combination of factors,” Near said.
This evolutionary success story is threatened by climate change that has made the Southern Ocean around Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth. The same traits that enabled the fish to survive and thrive on a cooling earth make them particularly susceptible to a warming one, notes Near.
“Given their strong polar adaptations and their inability to acclimate to warmer water temperatures, climate change could devastate this most interesting lineage of fish with a unique evolutionary history,” Near said.
Yale-affliated authors of the study are Alex Dornburg, Kristen L. Kuhn, and Jillian N. Pennington.
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I have to wonder though, what warming/climate change in Antarctica?
Maybe they are thinking of the surface record on the peninsula, where the greatest concentration of research stations, people, and energy use is. The air temperature there shows an increase.
But sea temperature near the peninsula doesn’t seem to be on the rise:
Or maybe they’ve spent too much time looking at Eric Steig’s graph:
Real Climate’s Dr. Eric Steig’s version, 2009 – from the cover of Nature
Instead of the one from 2004 before the Mannian PCA team math was applied to it:
Of course we now know thanks to O’Donnell et al that the whole “Antarctica is warming” theme from Steig and the team was just another statistical fabrication of air temperature.
Condon and O”Donnell’s Antarctic temperature profile, 2010.
It seems all the warming is in the peninsula, in the air temperature record, where all the people and energy use to keep them warm is.
Antarctica as a whole is not warming much at the surface, and as the UAH lower troposphere graph shows, not at all above the surface.
Antarctic sea ice seems to agree, it has an upward trend:
Joshua Corning makes an excellent point in comments:
“tens of millions of years ago a lineage of fish adapted to newly formed polar conditions”
“A rise of 2 degrees centigrade of water temperature will likely have a devastating impact on this Antarctic fish lineage”
That is weird…one wonders how they survived the far greater temperature changes over the past 20 million years.
You know…when Antarctica melted then froze gain….(image from Wikipedia)
Those fish with anti freeze can be unpredictable and dangerous. I brought some home and put them in my freezer, two days later when my wife went to get some milk, they jumped out and bit her.
Throughout geological history species have risen then become extinct. It is what happens. But the temperature anomalies do not seem to be much different from the natural variation and a 0.5C anomaly when its -20C still means it’s cold enough for ice to remain ice. I think these fish will continue to thrive without alarmists shouting the odds.
Me thinks the AGW crowd are manic depressive demons who will stop at nothing to destroy humans, Garlic and Silver are our only weapons. 😉
@Goldie
Those fish are sold in Russia, called “Ice Fish”, and they are THE tastiest damn fish you would ever try – as the fish eat nothing but prawns, their meat is unbelievably tender, wtih a very delicate prawn flavour. Also, They have a strange bone structure, so after cooking them for about a minute (no more), the whole skeleton can be separated. Oh, and they have skin, but no scales (or very tiny ones)…
I ate loads of them when I lived there….
Personally, I like the use of the word “illustrates” in the original article. What they are really saying is that they SPECULATE on how the fish adapted at some past time, but then they use this speculation as if it is an evidentiary truth, and then some more logical magic happens, and they conclude that a bit of warming will devastate this species apparently capable of incredible temperature adaptation but only in one direction.
But the whole argumentative edifice rests on accepting that they know how the original adaptation happened, with enough certainty and understanding to predict that it cannot happen in reverse.
This is a greatly different thing from simply accepting that adaptation occurred.
I call bollocks on the whole shebang.
Goldie says:
February 14, 2012 at 2:02 am
“Are they edible? How would they go with chips?”
They’re spiny.
It´s amazing that a reputable university as Yale is conducting research of this kind. I figure they would not have been financed had they not referred to climate warming.
You repeatedly mention the Antarctic peninsula as being “where the people and energy use is”. I believe you are making a false implication here. This suggests that peninsula warming is the product of some kind of urban heat island effect. But you are talking about a handful of very tiny (a few dozen buildings) and isolated research stations scattered across an absolutely huge frozen continent. Not much chance of an urban heat island effect going on there I’d say. Furthermore there are similar research stations located right across the Antarctic. They are not predominately in the peninsula. So I’m not sure what you are trying to get at here. Yes the warming is in the peninsula. But it really does seem to be getting warmer in the peninsula. It isn’t some kind of measurement error, and it isn’t an urban heat island effect from all those scientists toasting their sandwiches.
So when it warms up here in Europe I’ll have to drain the antifreeze from my car or it will die?
Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
Gute Deutsche sind immer bereit, die Weltordnung zu beheben, wann immer sie von ihrem Glauben abweicht, was auch immer der Preis ist.
Life’s too short to go without humor.
Thanks, Yale University, for another howler.
I always love ‘scientific’ studies that consist of nothing more than speculation. “If’ temperatures rise 2C (air temperatures or sea temperatures), then this fish species ‘could’ be devastated. Well, ‘if’ temperatures rise 2C, ‘wouldn’t’ the species that this fish displaced move back in to the area?
“If’ temperatures drop 2C, then fish species in the tropics ‘could’ be devastated (or maybe this fish expands its range. See, I can do ‘science’ too.
Could it be that there are too many profs around these days?
Anthony, your global temp reference page has not been updated to show january’s results. love the site and thank you for your efforts.
“I have to wonder though, what warming/climate change in Antarctica?”
– With the graph that follows those words, the perfect comment on the matter!
That feller does have a sort of Neanderthal look to him. The penguins are welcome.
From “The Vanishing Ice Caps,” a chapter in DSYC:
For the Nature article on Antarctica, Steig and Mann devised a statistical means of indicating warming more or less throughout Antarctica. In a nutshell, they took some mild warming from western Antarctica, especially the Peninsula, and generalized it eastward, covering the entire continent. But 98 percent of the continent remains bitterly cold, and no one disputes that. Also, the temperature recorded at the South Pole is agreed to have declined during the last 75 years.
More here: http://amzn.to/w0Lj6H
Ross from Brisbane – “A new paper Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE.. ”
Amen. But when will the sea levels arise? Or can that satellite of love up in the sky not tell us that?
MarcH says:
February 14, 2012 at 12:49 am
What is it about the biological sciences that leads to it consistently producing such nonsensical conclusions?
In a word ….Funding
I suspect that as much of the West`s financial resources availible for research have been “misappropriated” by the global warming meme that , unless Your research has the “global warming —> endangered” tag somewhere in the header , funding simply isn`t available . A rather sad indictment of the post-normal state of science in modern institutions when research for the sake of understanding how things work is regarded as an unworthy pursuit.
Joshua Corning says:
February 14, 2012 at 12:12 am
“tens of millions of years ago a lineage of fish adapted to newly formed polar conditions”
“A rise of 2 degrees centigrade of water temperature will likely have a devastating impact on this Antarctic fish lineage”
That is weird…one wonders how they survived the far greater temperature changes over the past 20 million years.
You know…when Antarctica melted then froze gain….
“Man-made” warming is likely to be more harmful!
Isn’t that string of underwater volcanoes under its western region warming certain Antarctic waters more than normal these days? That might lend credence to the “warming waters” part of the story, but certainly not the “global warming” attribution.
And if you are left wondering how exactly Thomas Near knows about “their inability to acclimate to warmer water temperatures” it is really really simple – he asked them!
What this research really tell us is that the AGW ‘research ‘ is still deep and well filled , so there are plenty of people willing to stick their hands in it to grasp as much as they can while they can.
I am just waiting for the research that ‘proves’ AGW is the reason more people don’t win the lottery .
But this is what they said to me Tom.
Has a certain railway engineer issued an appeal for alarmist (doesn’t matter how idiotic) for touting in the IPCC report as robust peer reviewed and published gospel.???
Food supply. All about food supply. Fish adapt to access more abundant food supplies. Researchers adapt to access more abundant supplies of funding. It appears that most all living things tend to adapt to what nature presents. It is neither good nor evil. In the case of research money there appears to be elements of compromise if not corruption.