Most idiotic climate claim ever?
I’m pretty sure some people lay awake at night trying to come up with new ways to demonstrate that planet is going to hell in a handbasket. As I pointed out in Why climate change communications is like ‘Shaka, when the walls fell’, it’s all about imagery, not facts.
What better imagery then than turning lobsters into B-movie crustacean cannibals by making a lame-assed “experiment” that you put up on YouTube, complete with movie titles. Of course the non-thinkers are eating this right up, and they don’t even need drawn butter. Watch:
From Climate Desk:
Noah Oppenheim’s plan was simple: Rig a young lobster underneath a waterproof, infrared camera; drop the contraption overboard off the coast of Maine; and see who comes along for a bite to eat. The takers, he expected, would be fish: Cod, herring, and other “groundfish” found in these waters that are known to love a good lobster dinner. Similar experiments conducted in the 1990s showed that apart from being snatched up in one of the thousands of traps that sprinkle the sea floor here—tools of this region’s signature trade—fish predation was the principle cause of lobster death. Instead, Oppenheim, a marine biology graduate student at the University of Maine, captured footage that looks like it comes straight from the reel of a 1950s B-grade horror movie: Rampant lobster cannibalism.
First, lobsters are scavengers, so they’ll take advantage of anything that is stressed, dying, or dead. No surprises there.
Second , the fossil record of clawed lobsters extends back at least to the Valanginian Age of the Cretaceous. So of course, they’ve survived some of the warmest periods of Earth’s history.
Third, it seems there’s a hockey stick in lobsters, all while that warmth induced cannibalism is going on:
![lobstergraph[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/lobstergraph1.jpg?quality=83)
Source of data: Maine Dept. of Marine Resources.
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I’ve started to pinch things..helll… it must be Mad Lobster disease….Doctor..fetch me a hockey stick quick!
Stressed, dying, dead or alive, lobsters don’t care. Just so long as it is food to lobsters. They’d eat people the same way if they got a chance. Much as lions eat their prey only lobsters are far less choosy.
“Look here!” Says the first lobster. “They’ve got two claws all tied up.”
“Well now.” Coming from lobster number two. “He’s only got one claw. Dibs on the other one.”
“Better save some of that for us. It’s only right, cause he’s our dear relation. Therefore we have right to the tail.” Said several more lobsters skittering around the corner of a rock.
“You all better drop that fresh lobster or I’ll eat all of you too.” Croaks a behemoth of a lobster scuttling over the rock.
Warmists and greens; blind and willfully ignorant as to how nature works.
Latest Climate Crazy UK Daily Telegraph 11.03.14
Surfers along Australia’s East Coast have been warned by researchers that climate change is likely to cause a severe drop in the frequency of big waves. A study published in Nature Climate found that the number of days with waves of 12ft or more on the East coast would drop by around 20% over the next 30 years and by up to 40% by the end of the century.
Best sell your surfboards now while there is still a market for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_(zoology)
“Cannibalism seems to be especially prevalent in aquatic communities, in which up to approximately 90% of the organisms engage in cannibalism at some point of the life cycle”
A U.S. Senator from Connecticut said during last night’s debate that all the Connecticut lobsters were smart enough to move to Maine to avoid global warming and thus ruin the local lobster industry. The genius of a Senator also moaned about the sea level rise (which has been happening at the same rate since records were kept) and the heat wave they experienced last year of 90 degree weather for a week.
We must do something to stop this.
Richard,
I can attest to that. I used to raise tropical fish, and I would watch as the mommy fish casually ate up her babies as they swam by.
Oops- I called last night’s rambling on the Senate floor a debate- all apologies.
a marine biology graduate student….
is a total moron and doesn’t know it’s common practice to leave the undersized lobsters in the trap…
….as bait for larger ones
Joel O’Bryan says:
March 11, 2014 at 9:11 am
“Also, since cooking a dead lobster is really, really a bad idea, lobsters have been boiled alive since the dawn of time. Can’t wait for that to be the next PETA cause célèbre, as they already condemn it on their website.”
In Europe, PETA is on the Red List of pressure groups as Femen and the German Pirate Party compete for the exhibitionist nude women.
One only has to figure out how to turn lobsters into biofuel and make the stuff competitive on subsidies. Problem solved.
“When you were at university were the people studying meteorology or oceanography the brightest?” he asked. Maths and physics seemed to attract the most intellectually able, Lindzen observed.
“What I’m getting at is, when you’re dealing with the IPCC, is it’s manpower intensive. You heard someone mention that 58 per cent of participants are new participants. I know from my group that lots who have participated once have decided not to participate again. That’s not a bad thing per se, but in a small field where you have to keep finding people when there aren’t any … The world just doesn’t have that many ‘leading climate scientists’. So we’re inventing something.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/31/tell_us_were_all_doomed_mps_beg_climate_scientists/?page=2
So, what’s the reason for lobster cannibalism when we’re not in a warm phase of the AMO?
Joel O’Bryan says:
March 11, 2014 at 9:11 am
> http://www.peta.org/about-peta/faq/what-is-the-most-humane-way-to-cook-lobsters-boiling-them-or-steaming-them-in-the-microwave/
I tried cooking a lobster in the microwave oven once. It doesn’t heat the central nervous system fast enough, and I apologized to the lobster all through dinner. I boil water an inch or two deep, add some salt and allspice, and put the lobsters in head first and upside down.
Tom J says:
March 11, 2014 at 9:22 am
Lobsternado!
—GOAL!
Come on you guys, think of the children
think of the lobsters
think of the lobsters children
Hello, this is Noah Oppenheim, the scientist featured in the Climate Desk video you have reviewed here. I am happy to answer any legitimate questions you or your readers might have about this study.
The key result of my investigations into predation on juvenile lobsters in the subtidal areas of the Gulf of Maine is that young lobsters are now being cannibalized in the wild frequently enough to be detected in a tethering study, whereas they were not being cannibalized frequently enough to be detected in a similar tethering study twenty years ago. That is a demonstrable fact, peer reviewed by renowned scientists and published in the scientific literature.
Now, let’s examine what has happened in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Maine (where young lobsters live) in that same period of twenty years. Firstly, the temperature has increased significantly, particularly in the shallower waters where many younger lobsters spend their early development. This has resulted in increased population abundance, as you have correctly noted in your Maine landings figure, which in turn means that lobsters will encounter each-other more frequently as they search for food. Secondly, a vast majority of the predatory groundfish (which are known to prey on lobsters) in the inshore waters of Maine have been overfished or have moved elsewhere. This also results in increased lobster populations, but it also means that larger lobsters are less threatened by predators and will search for food over a greater area, also increasing their encounter rates. As a result of these two ‘forces’ on lobster populations, there are both more lobsters in the water than ever before, and the increased probability of encounters between them leads to cannibalism at levels that were not previously detectable.
Nobody is arguing that lobsters are not cannibalistic until temperatures reach a certain threshold. Nobody is arguing that lobsters will cannibalize themselves into extinction. I am not sure how your or your readers came to those conclusions based on the Climate Desk video. If you or your readers are interested in reading a more technical description of the phenomena being summarized in the video I recommend reading my scientific paper entitled “Cannibals by night? In situ video monitoring reveals diel shifts in inter- and intra-specific predation on the American lobster” (it can be found here: http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjfas-2013-0099).
In reference to the three points you made in the text of your blog post:
1) Lobsters are opportunistic scavengers as well as predators. However, as I noted above, their abundance and foraging behavior were most likely limited in the past such that cannibalism was not detected in any previous experiments.
2) The American lobster, one of several species of clawed lobsters, has a demonsted upper temperature threshold (called the Arrhenius break point) of around 19-20 degrees C, above which they cannot survive for long. The fact that other, extinct clawed lobster species have been capable of surviving in higher temperatures in the prehistoric past is completely irrelevant.
3) It is true that lobster populations in Maine have increased significantly. The rate of this increase is likely far greater than any increases in predation rates due to cannibalism. However, again, this does not alter the fact that the predation of juvenile lobsters by larger lobsters in the wild is a newly discovered phenomenon.
Many interesting questions arise from this research: to what degree does temperature as opposed to fish population declines influence the cannibalistic behavior of lobsters? Would circumstances exist where lobster populations could decline due to cannibalism? What was the actual frequency of lobster cannibalism in the wild twenty years ago?
I would encourage the debate about this issue to focus on relevant questions that deal with established facts. I hope this response has clarified some of these questions for you and your readers.
REPLY: Thanks for your update. Did you also notify some of the news organizations that are pushing this in the meme of being caused by global warming, or is this the only story you are objecting to? Feel free to provide links to your similar complaints elsewhere.
As to your question about how we came to certain conclusions about the paper being warming related, note the subtitle on the Climate Desk story:
As for the video, if you don’t want people to treat it like some ridiculous sci-fi B-movie, then don’t allow Climate Desk to make such videos representing your work as such. You participated, and are thus culpable in the production of it. – Anthony
Interesting interpretation. They set out bait, call it prey, film it, and call the result science.
How much has the sea warmed there and over what period? If you set out bait in areas where the sea has not warmed does this repeat? Is it known that the earlier study also set out bait in this way, and did anyone take note of the fish and lobster populations then and now? There are advantages in numbers. Are there studies that show lobster are not normally cannibalistic? Are lobsters attracted to any other lobster that appears to be struggling? Did this or any previous studies establish the availability of food preferred by lobster was available in equal proportions? Is it possible that lobsters will attack other lobsters that are not part of the local gene pool? That is to say, farmed lobsters may appear to be a threat or tasty to native lobsters but may not appear to be lobsters owing to characteristics of the introduced critter.
Is it not bad practice to introduce non-native specimens into an established population?
Epic fail.
I hope they don’t all decimate themselves.
Hansen said that someday we’d all be able to get boiled lobster right off the boat.
No one has mentioned Derek and Clive
Worst job i ever had was Lobsters and actress Raquel Welsh’s bottom
Please dont look it up on youtube it is very rude but very funny
Noah Oppenheim,
This site is the multiple winner of the Weblog Awards for the internet’s “Best Science & Technology” site. Thousands of readers visit here every week, so it is good to have your input.
In the interest of credibility, I would be interested in knowing if you have notified any other news organizations, as Anthony asked. Have you made other complaints like the one above? Any links would be appreciated.
Many of us are getting very tired of the false implication that ‘global warming’ is the cause of every biological event. In this instance, you are taking a strictly regional temperature fluctuation, and implying sweeping generalizations. For your information, such local changes occur all the time. It would be very unusual, if not unprecedented, if there were not local changes over time in all temperate latitudes.
Sorry if this is goring your ox, but this ‘study’ appears to be ridiculous and unnecessary. What would be unusual would be a clear statement by you that this is an example of regional climate variability, abetted by changes in fishing. Human emissions have nothing to do with it.
Why not stand out from the crowd, and state explicitly that your findings fit in with natural variablility? Because that is a fact. But if, by your silence, the belief in human-caused global warming is allowed to remain, then you are part of the problem.
They showed a video about a disease that hurt lobsters in 1988 in CT and claimed that the lobsters never returned. Then, they show a “pulse” of a lobster boom that started in CT.
The entire video was obviously nonsense.
Thanks, Noah. Can you link to the two tethering studies? Yours and the one from twenty years ago? I’d love to compare the statistical methods (e.g. the number of tetherings in each study, the estimated number of lobsters per square foot in each study, etc.) and video technology used.
Noah,
It would have been better if you said the truth, that you have a BA and are a grad student.
http://www.umaine.edu/marine/people/profile/noah_oppenheim
You are not a scientist. You may have done sciencey stuff, but certainly making a cheesy misleading video would not count as science, would it?
As to stating that it is AGW that has caused your being able to use lobsters as bait for lobsters, I would ask you to offer us specifics, like how warm the waters have gotten. And a history of water temps in the region. and a linkage between CO2 and the warming.
Instead you offer up bits of old B movies and some inflammatory optics.
As any lobster knows, if you can’t stnd the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
Noah,
So what you saying is that your experiment had proven that when lobsters meet they probably going to do some nasty things to reach other, is that right?
You could have saved yourself a lot of work by simple buying 2 of them in a store, taking the bands off and putting them in a fish tank.
You have not proven anything else.
You are implying that lobster cannibalism is something new and in cold weather lobsters wouldn’t eat each other – and it’s a complete garbage.
You say predation of juvenile lobsters by larger lobsters in the wild is a newly discovered phenomenon.
First, tying up a lobster for others to eat is not “in the wild”.
Second, this is absolutely not a new phenomenon – as a scuba diver in MA, I became aware of common knowledge that lobsters do eat each other in the wild given opportunity. That was about 15 years ago.
Lobsters always thought and always will think that lobster is delicious.
Darn, hit submit too quickly.
Noah,
Somehow, I seriously doubt if your assertion that juvenile lobsters were not tasty morsels for mature lobsters prior to the age of AGW will hold up under scrutiny. I do find your work an interesting case study on the powers of the AGW meme to shape the perceptions of even intelligent people so that they in effect live out the old proverb about how the man with only a hammer sees all problems as nails.