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)
it may very well all be true and alarming
soooo
where is the next party in the world to fly to for a week , with 30.000 wetnosed dogooder nannystate troopers faux-working at a high rate, and demand more to be done, with other people’s money ?
guys, stories like this one are going to keep us distracted from the real game.
those fish are going to have proxy voting rights in agenda 21
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
David L says:
February 14, 2012 at 2:08 am
Yale gave Mann a PhD… Now there’s something to really be ashamed about.
A PhD in Hockey perhaps?
It always something isn’t it?
For those of you somehow attributing some superior academic and ethical standards to Yale, just know that the Ivy League schools are the nuttiest of the wing-nut Politically Correct faculties in science and the humanities. These aren’t PC Line Toers, these produce the PC line drawers.
This study must have been funded using the “global warming” key words in the grant application.
morgo says:
February 14, 2012 at 12:33 am
“All I can say I am disappointed In Yale University to go so low just to get a research grant ,hang your heads in shame.”
Yes this is very unfortunate. But these days, you are almost obligated to put in scary climate change garbage into what would normally be a dull research report in order to increase your chances of funding. And I believe it’s the high pressure university environment and tenure system that’s at fault. After all, as they say in academia, it’s “publish or perish”. So if you don’t bring in enough research dollars or publish large numbers of papers in established scientific journals, you won’t have a job. And as we all know from Climategate, academic journals have certain “content standards” when it comes to climate change papers.
Oh dear God not again! I see the words “global warming” or some such nonsense and I’m done with the article before I even start reading it. How long can they cling to this canard? Till the funding runs out I suppose.
For some reason, experts forget that they believe in random variation and natural selection, that more offspring are produced in each generation than can survive to adulthood, that the populations have already survived larger swings in environmental features (including but not limited to temperature), and all the other details of the evolutionary history of species that they claim are “threatened” by global warming.
If you want to see a great animation on the antarctic water temps from Argo Floats go here:
http://bulletin.mercator-ocean.fr/html/produits/bestproduct/welcome_anim_en.jsp?zone=acc
It shows an interesting cycle that is on the cooling trend now.
I used this source to bolster my theory El Nino and El Nina are actually driven by underwater volcanic activity (not air or solar heating as is the conventional ‘wisdom’):
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/18084
The already-visible ecological consequences associated to warming Antarctic sea temperatures are well-described here: King Crabs Threaten Seafloor Life Near Antarctica.
?
Hmmm … yet maybe the *crucial* endangered species isn’t Antarctic fish, but rather, climate-change skeptics who still are confident that
Because it’s obvious — isn’t it? — that a sustained trend of warming temperatures will devastate the global population of this class of climate-change skeptics.
Google ‘antarctic volcanos’. There are a couple of dozen along the northern edge of Antarctica.
Volcanos being located along the northern edge of Antarctica is about as significant as this paper. All shores / boundries are north. Of interest is the existance of volcanos.
The fish doesn’t look like it would provide much of a fillet as the tail section is small and narrow.
Has anyone ever cooked a penguin?
A practical lesson in free market principles:
Too many research dollars + alarmist zealots = Junk science
hmmm. Did the research crew GO there? Or did they just wiki it and plug it into a model? My hunch? Field research is dead. Wiki is the new source for pictures of research subjects. And I lay that at Hansen’s dry feet. He’s the one that had the hubris to collect data from someone else who collected it from someone else who collected it from someone else and then say that his results were accurate to 0.000000005 degrees without ever actually visiting a collection site or calibrating the instruments.
I seriously doubt these researchers actually got into Antarctic waters with thermometers in hand, looking for these fish and taking water temperatures. I seriously doubt these researchers actually tried to boil one of these spiney fish to check its water temperature tolerance range. Actually, I just seriously doubt all of it.
Thanks Hansen. You are a real credit to scientific advancement.
Anthony,
You need a new category of stories…. Could Might Maybe.
Unfortunately, it WOULD fill up fast.
What was the sea temperature in the southern ocean 10 million years ago? The world as a whole was much warmer, so it is certainly possible that the southern ocean was a degree or so warmer than today (although Antarctic ice had formed starting about 33 million years ago).
Could, woulda, shoulda, may, might, maybe, etc., etc.
I can do a thesaurus of weasle words too. I never considered it “science”, however (unless you’re majoring in philology). But grant-seekers find it sufficient to acquire grants. How sad.
On the other hand, couple the six words above with all the climate-related aspects of the earth and you have SIX TIMES more to study! Eureka–a veritable gold pot of “Grant Science”.
I really hate it when these studies are not fully available online. Scientific studies should be online available for everyone to read. Especially those that say it is global warming (ehhh… climate change) which threatens a species.
You are missing the point. Let’s say you are an associate professor and you want to study “ the evolutionary history of Antarctic fish and their “anti-freeze” proteins”. There is this group of people with deep pockets willing fund climate change. They give you money. You get to study what you want and all you have to do is pay homage to their cause. And if you do it well enough, you get money in the future because you are one of the good guys. This is called a win win scenario.
Global Warming…it’s EVERYWHERE!!
http://news.yahoo.com/global-warming-makes-elephant-seals-dive-deeper-study-181007980.html
…Anybody noticing that “global warming” is creeping back into the news vocabulary, replacing “climate change”?? Run-up to the election??
Interesting, I lived at a house that had a small goldfish pond, really a basin, that was about 2 feet in diameter and about 18″ deep. It had goldfish in it, which I don’t think have anti-freeze. In the winter, it appeared the pond froze solid, but there could have been some liquid water at the very bottom. When the pond thawed out, the goldfish were always there, swimming around. And that pond would get quite warm in the summer. So I imagine a 2 degree temperature change would kill them all, only because AGW kills everything, except where it doesn’t.
Again with the studies. My study of university studies shows that those producing studies may lack basic self-awareness and “Have no sense of decency, sir, at long last.”
Ian, Ian, Ian. You have now stepped into the trap. I hear the door closing behind you. Quietly. 🙂
People – 10 million years ago was a long time ago. Fish forget. They don’t remember how to evolve anymore. Duh. Crazy sceptics!
/sarc
The most endangered species because of GW is the human species, because as a consequence of Green measures too many of them don’t have the means for surviving, they are “underwater” without any “anti-freeze” proteins. 🙂 (A smiley face, though it is a very serious matter).
I am not saying that there is UHI effect but take into account that there are only a handfull of surface stations on the whole continent. I don´ know if these few stations are close to scientific settlements.
If you are interested you can read the Dirty Harry series at Climate Audit, where Steve McIntyre explains the problems found on Steig´s paper.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/02/01/west-antarctic-stations/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/02/02/when-harry-met-gill/
Heh, if you click on the first link and read the comments you can find a post of mine where I suggested Dirty Harry as the title of the series. :D:D:D just 3 years ago. Time flies.