From the ‘Carbon Dioxide, is there anything it can’t destroy?’ department and the University of Adelaide’s department of science fiction, comes this laughable press release. Let’s see, sharks have been around for about 450 million years, and in that time the planet has been significantly warmer than today, and has had far higher CO2 levels than today during that time. Somehow, sharks managed to cope with that. And of course, this isn’t an in situ study of sharks hunting ability, noooo, it’s sharks in a tank with prey thrown in while these clowns jacked around with CO2 levels in the water. Studies in captivity are NOT the same as the ocean. Just ask any salt water aquarium owner how difficult it is to keep specimens healthy under even the best aquarium management practice. Even worse, they only studied one kind of shark, yet extrapolate that to all sharks in the headline of the press release. In my opinion, this study would get laughed out of any grade school science fair, but somehow it gets a pass in peer review.
![FindingNemo65[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/findingnemo651.jpg?resize=677%2C363&quality=83)
Sharks’ hunting ability destroyed under climate change
The hunting ability and growth of sharks will be dramatically impacted by increased CO2 levels and warmer oceans expected by the end of the century, a University of Adelaide study has found.
Published today in the journal Scientific Reports, marine ecologists from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute report long-term experiments that show warmer waters and ocean acidification will have major detrimental effects on sharks’ ability to meet their energy demands, with the effects likely to cascade through entire ecosystems.
The laboratory experiments, studying Port Jackson sharks and including large tanks with natural habitat and prey, found embryonic development was faster under elevated temperatures. But the combination of warmer water and high CO2 increased the sharks’ energy requirement, reduced metabolic efficiency and removed their ability to locate food through olfaction (smelling). These effects led to marked reductions in growth rates of sharks.
“In warmer water, sharks are hungrier but with increased CO2 they won’t be able to find their food,” says study leader Associate Professor Ivan Nagelkerken, Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow.
“With a reduced ability to hunt, sharks will no longer be able to exert the same top-down control over the marine food webs, which is essential for maintaining healthy ocean ecosystems.”
PhD student Jennifer Pistevos, who carried out the study, says the Port Jackson is a bottom-feeding shark that primarily relies on its ability to smell to find food. Under higher CO2, the sharks took a much longer time to find their food, or didn’t even bother trying, resulting in considerably smaller sharks.
Most research studying the effects of ocean acidification and climate change on fish behaviour has concentrated on small fish prey. Long-term studies on the behaviour and physiology of large, long-lived predators are largely lacking.
Fellow University of Adelaide marine ecologist Professor Sean Connell says the results of the study provide strong support for the call to prevent global overfishing of sharks.
“One-third of shark and ray species are already threatened worldwide because of overfishing,” Professor Connell says. “Climate change and ocean acidification are going to add another layer of stress and accelerate those extinction rates.”
###
UPDATE: As is typical of alarmist science that goes for headlines, they didn’t include a title for the paper, a DOI, or a link to the paper. I’ve dug it up and that information is below.
Ocean acidification and global warming impair shark hunting behaviour and growth
Abstract:
Alterations in predation pressure can have large effects on trophically-structured systems. Modification of predator behaviour via ocean warming has been assessed by laboratory experimentation and metabolic theory. However, the influence of ocean acidification with ocean warming remains largely unexplored for mesopredators, including experimental assessments that incorporate key components of the assemblages in which animals naturally live. We employ a combination of long-term laboratory and mesocosm experiments containing natural prey and habitat to assess how warming and acidification affect the development, growth, and hunting behaviour in sharks. Although embryonic development was faster due to temperature, elevated temperature and CO2 had detrimental effects on sharks by not only increasing energetic demands, but also by decreasing metabolic efficiency and reducing their ability to locate food through olfaction. The combination of these effects led to considerable reductions in growth rates of sharks held in natural mesocosms with elevated CO2, either alone or in combination with higher temperature. Our results suggest a more complex reality for predators, where ocean acidification reduces their ability to effectively hunt and exert strong top-down control over food webs.
The paper is open source here: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16293
The Supplementary info is here: http://www.nature.com/article-assets/npg/srep/2015/151112/srep16293/extref/srep16293-s1.doc
Update 2: Based on table S2 of the SI, it seems they only tested for 400ppm and 1000ppm, no mention if they somehow increased that gradually [to mimic the natural rate of change over years]. The point is that at our current growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere at ~2ppm it will take approximately 300 years for our atmosphere to reach that level. Just throwing sharks in a 1000ppm tank (even given a week) isn’t anywhere close to simulating that, and removes all natural evolutionary and adaptation processes from the experiment.
Update 3: I wonder how the media will reconcile the “destroyed” hunting ability of sharks with the claims that global warming caused shark attacks this past summer? Inquiring minds want to know.
Update4: David Hoffer writes in comments about what he found in the paper:
…you have to hunt through to finally find this snippet:
The eggs were left to acclimatize over a period of seven days where temperature was steadily increased by 1 °C to the elevated temperature treatment. The eggs were kept in either control (~400 μatm) or elevated CO2 (~1000 μatm)16,58 crossed with control (~16 °C) or elevated temperature (~19 °C)
So:
They applied a change of +3 deg C over a period of days
The applied a change from 400 uatm CO2 to 1000 uatm CO2 over a period of days
Sure, let’s cram a century of change into one week and see what happens! It gets worse:
In addition, the whole experiment was only 68 days long. 68 days! They extrapolated results by weighing the sharks at 62 days and 68 days. Yes, a whole 6 days!
When they moved the sharks from the small hatching tanks to the larger environment, the elevated temp/co2 sharks were fed DOUBLE the control group for the first little while, and then their feeding was REDUCED for the later part of the experiment to match that of the control group. Why? And how would that affect the results at the end of the experiment?
I can’t even work up the energy to come up with an acerbic sarcastic remark.
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I am sharked, sharked I tell you.
Good one, ShrNfr.
“I’m sharked…”
A modest proposal: Us “good” guys have finally been “gifted” (see relevant commentary attached to other posts, below) with a metaphor comparable to the Hive-Bozo’s only, gotta-give-’em-credit, whatever-it-takes, agit-prop success–namely, that whole “denier”, weaponized-adjective, Adolph-what’s-his-name-again?-subliminal-gotcha!, stick-it-to-the-overly-curious-Gruber-proof-rubes uber-meme, which once had an undeniable, bully-boy/mean-girl, real “sting”, but which has since been attenuated to a “there-go-the-good-comrades-again!” irrelevancy by over-use.
So let’s quit with the “jumpin’ the shark”, or similar figures-of-speech, already!. Rather, let’s go for the lefty-puke, Hive-Bozo’s jugular, from now on! You know, like, henceforth whenever the hive tries to fire-off one of its agit-prop, “it’s-worse-than-we-thought”, paid-troll, hive-flunky PR-boogers, let us altruistic lovers of Liberty and ethical science all fire-back with a “once again, the hive-tools pull a ‘poop swastika’ out of their collective, privileged-white-butt, mummy-coddled, ‘thermorrhoid’ ass!”
In other words, you know, keep it real, and everything!
Well notice that it is only the big sharks that die out. Maybe they died out from eating all of the available food.
Gluttony gets you extinct.
g
AAAAAAAAAAY!!!
You know, people got all worried about Sharknados, but what about the REAL threat? Yes, I’m talking about Sharkicanes. Imagine a Sharknado 150 miles across? The horror. Hopefully, models will correctly predict where the Sharkicanes will make landfall.
ShrNfr — laughing out loud — Eugene WR Gallun
Stressing sharks should cut their numbers.
That’s good, right?
“combination of warmer water and high CO2” AND! Hooray for multivariate studies.
The warmer the sea gets, the less C02 it can contain.
DA Koehl,
That’s one of the central issues in ‘climate science’. Does global warming result from a rise in CO2, or does global warming cause CO2 to outgas from the oceans?
The only empirical evidence we have shows that ∆CO2 follows ∆ T.
In other words, the causation is that ∆T is primary the cause of ∆CO2:
This same cause and effect is found at all time scales, from years (above) to hundreds of thousands of years:
(click in charts to embiggen)
Thanks DB
Long ago, a collegue pointed this out to me and it made me go hmmmm.
I still like the warmer during Roman and Minoan civilization chart for instant awareness, but this brings back older memories. Kind of like a first date feeling.
This doesnt fit on tshirt quite as well as the other.
Both good.
Need to figure out how to work it into the top ten though.
Not to knock your charts and graphs, but have you ever opened a bottle of soda (carbon dioxide, water, and syrup) on a hot day?
Teachable moment.
Is the soda bottle anything like this teachable moment ?
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/alatheia-larsen/2015/11/12/neil-cavuto-provides-math-lesson-student-demanding-free
No, Henry’s law is the governing principle here. The increase in atmospheric CO2 dominates the relatively small change in absorbancy due to temperature change. Remember, it’s a very small change in temperature (1C) versus a doubling of CO2 concentration in the air.
Besides, one thing they did do right is change both the atmosphere and temperature and not try to directly control the CO2 level of the water. The CO2 level of the water will fall as it will given those conditions.
Also the less O2 and every other gas it can hold, so we are all going to die.
The Port Jackson shark is a protected species, far from being a commercial catch.
What a ridiculous “study”, a waste of peoples intelligence to be directed by the Universities to spend their time studying the absurd.
The apex predator of the petting pool! (sarc)
Well the Port Jackson shark IS a bottom-feeder, so these ‘researchers” would obviously feel some affinity with it.
“What a ridiculous “study”, a waste of peoples intelligence to be directed by the Universities to spend their time studying the absurd.”
Translation: She has a bright future in government sponsored climate change research.
They are also a common resident of aquariums and oceanariums, where there is little to resemble their ecologocal niche around inshore reefs. Perhaps they studied their own fish tanks in the lab. Incidentally, wasn’t this the latest University to reject research by Dr Lomborg?
Is there a link to the paper?
This write up doesn’t mention what the actual temperature differences, CO2 differences were, or how fast they were changed.
Of course there isn’t, these clowns don’t want you to look at the paper, they want the headline – hence they don’t provide a link to the paper. I’ll see if I can dig it up though.
think I found it
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16293
See update 2 above, I found it as well as the SI, and the SI has the “tell” of why this is laughably bad science.
See update 2 above, I found it as well as the SI, and the SI has the “tell” of why this is laughably bad science.
Ha, you posted while I was writing up my read of it below. They actually started out with eggs, and raised the temp/CO2 over a period of a week (I think). So centuries of change compressed into a week. Then the experiment was only 68 days long. But my biggest objection is to the way they fed the sharks after they moved them from the small hatching tanks to the larger environment. The elevated temp sharks were fed MORE initially, and then the food was reduced to the same as what the control group got. So, the prefattened sharks suddenly get their food supply reduced, and the immediate result at the tail end of the experiment (a whole 68 days!) is that they don’t do as well. Huh. Who would have figured?
@davidmhoffer
That last part about feeding is the smoking gun. It’s a fundamental flaw in this study that undermines all its results, and should be the main objection to it, I feel. Sharks used to feeding with double the prey density are not going to be as good of hunters (no need, and there will be a lot stronger smell signal to acclimate to) than sharks who have grown up with scarcer prey (weaker amount of smells around, necessitating increased acuity). Being pre-fattened also reduces the need to eat for while. And, having prey supply suddenly cut in half will put stress on the animal.
Could very well be that the temperature and CO2 did absolutely nothing, and all the effects seen in the paper were due to the change in feeding at the very end of the study–on top of that end of study measurement window being laughably short.
Most likely, their high temp/high CO2 sharks adapted and acclimated after the 6 days and their results disappeared!
Equally important is what they were feeding. These sharks eat sea urchins, mussels, and clams. Specially adapted mouth. They were fed previously frozen shrimp. See my comment below.
How does a PHD candidate mess up elementary level experiment controls by changing up the feeding of the two groups? My daughter knew better as a Kindergardener mixing glue and Borax!
It’s either rank incompetence or deliberate malfeance. Changing the feeding is so integral to the findings of the study that it invalidates the whole thing.
This shouldn’t have gotten off her professor’s desk, much less made it through peer reivew. What was Nature thinking accepting this?
“”””…..
benofhouston
November 12, 2015 at 2:15 pm
How does a PHD candidate mess up elementary level experiment controls by changing up the feeding of the two groups? …..”””””
Well she is now the world’s leading expert on the birthing and raising of Port Jackson sharks.
Actually, she is the only person on the planet, with any economic interest in Port Jackson sharks. So she is not angling for a paying job. She wants to join the 65% of all US PhD Physics graduates, who NEVER get a job in their area of expertise, and become post doc fellows at some moneyed institute or other. There the may sucker in other nincompoops to study something else, that nobody is interested in.
g
It is anti-science.
The baleful influence of corrupt and corrupting “consensus climate science”.
I love the picture.
From “Finding Nemo,” if I’m not mistaken. The big guy in the middle is Bruce.
Oops, just saw the caption under the picture ….
“I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food.”
Just don’t get a nose bleed around him. 🙂
me 2!
I imagine the next sequel to “Sharknado” will involve teeny weeny sharks.
‘Carbon Dioxide, is there anything it can’t destroy?’
——-
It’s destroying lawn mowers, due to all that grass growing extra- fast.
Has anyone updated the list of CAGW-CO2 casualties?
The Port Jackson Shark is a bottom feeder, which means that it grazes, like a cow. Further, if you’re dealing with bottom feeders can you imagine the difficulty in maintaining a bottom that lends itself to the “all other things being equal” condition that this sort of research requires?
I’m very sure that these people are too dense to to even begin to know what they don’t know.
The less you know, the easier it seems.
If I had to write that stuff in order to make a living, I’d think I’d prefer to shoot myself.
John: I think that depends on what your alternative ways of making a living. It is amazing what some government body will pay for garbage done by graduate students. It’s kinda like John Cook’s 97% consensus study that was neither study, nor scholarship, and written by a bunch of graduate psychology students.
just imagine how much worse this can get with free college tuition (compliments of us)
Just in time – Justin Trudeau, Canada’s eastern elected Prime Minister – he will save the sharks. Justin, with the same brain power as a shark, understands sharks. After all Justin’s “experience” to be elected as PM was rafting which he claims happened on water – his other job was drama teacher – now, who better to save the sharks?
Apparently he was also worked as a bouncer at a bar for a while…
Must have been a gay bar !!
If you work the numbers on IPCC AR5 Figure 6.1 you will discover that anthro C is partitioned 57/43 between natural sequestration and atmospheric retention. (555 – 240 = 315 PgC & 240/555) IMO this arbitrary partition was “assumed” in order to “prove” (i.e. make the numbers work) that anthro C was solely/90% responsible for the 112 ppmv atmos CO2 increase between 1750 – 2011. C is not CO2.
PgC * 3.67 = PgCO2 * 0.1291 = ppmv atmospheric CO2
IPCC AR5 Figure 6.1
……………………………….PgC/y……ppmv/y
FF & Land Use Source…….8.9……….4.22
Ocean & Land Sink…………4.9……… 2.32
Net Source.……………….….4.0……….1.90
If the anthro 8.9 Pg C/y (4.2 ppmv CO2/y) suddenly vanishes the natural cycle that remains would be a constant sink of 2.3 ppmv CO2/y. Reverse extrapolation (GCMs & RCPs apply forward extrapolation) calculates that 121 years in the past (278 ppmv CO2/2.3 ppmv CO2) or the year 1629 (1750-121) atmos CO2 would have been 0, zero, nadda, zip, nowhere to be found.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave!
The 8.9 Pg of anthro C simply vanishes in earth’s 45,000 plus Pg C cauldron of stores and fluxes. Mankind’s egoistic, egocentric, conceit means less than nothing to the earth, the solar system and the universe.
“However, warming will not occur in isolation, but in combination with ocean acidification which is predicted to decrease ocean pH by 0.3–04 units by the end of the century16,20.”
Ocean acidification .. roflmao !!!
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28468-growing-corals-bathe-themselves-in-acid-without-suffering-damage/
Anthony – Please consider doing a separate report on the study posted by AndyG55.
It states that Growing Corals Bathe Themselves in Acid from CO2, without suffering damage.
It states that healthy corals are thriving in the Acidic environment and that separate studies with CO2 added to boxes with corals did not harm the corals.
So…. here is the link to the paper:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16293
Which you have to hunt through to finally find this snippet:
The eggs were left to acclimatize over a period of seven days where temperature was steadily increased by 1 °C to the elevated temperature treatment. The eggs were kept in either control (~400 μatm) or elevated CO2 (~1000 μatm)16,58 crossed with control (~16 °C) or elevated temperature (~19 °C)
So:
They applied a change of +3 deg C over a period of days
The applied a change from 400 uatm CO2 to 1000 uatm CO2 over a period of days
Sure, let’s cram a century of change into one week and see what happens! It gets worse:
In addition, the whole experiment was only 68 days long. 68 days! They extrapolated results by weighing the sharks at 62 days and 68 days. Yes, a whole 6 days!
When they moved the sharks from the small hatching tanks to the larger environment, the elevated temp/co2 sharks were fed DOUBLE the control group for the first little while, and then their feeding was REDUCED for the later part of the experiment to match that of the control group. Why? And how would that affect the results at the end of the experiment?
I can’t even work up the energy to come up with an acerbic sarcastic remark.
Obviously over feeding the elevated temp/co2 sharks before the initial weigh in is creating bias. If this was not intentional, these guys are some of the most incompetent people on earth.
These people sound like modern day alchemists. This is the result we want, we make the “science” up as we go along, lo and behold the result we expected,
The universities and the taxpayer pay real money for the equivalent of fool’s gold.
“applied a change from 400 uatm CO2 to 1000 uatm CO2 over a period of days”
Note: that’s atmospheric concentration, isn’t it? I’m not sure this increases the concentration in water that has increasing temperature at the same time.
If I didn’t already know that there was a meeting of clowns in Paris later this month, I could have worked it out by now. The idiotic “science” is being spewed forth a great deal more than usual.
This is yet another one I can add to my ever increasing list of unlikely side effects that those of us in a prospering First World should be ashamed of. I am surprised they haven’t invited the sharks to comment. Oh I forgot they already have!.
The sharks were either going lose the ability to feed, and then they all die. Or they would be super charged and over feed, causing a collapse of the food chain, then they would all die. No matter what, the conclusion of the study was predetermined: Sharks are doomed because of increased CO2 caused by man.
So increasing CO2 will decrease the likelihood of Sharknadoes. Finally, CO2 is good for something.
Judging by the increase in shark attacks around eastern Australia these past 12 months, I would conclude that this study fails on all counts.
They certainly seem to be able to hunt surfers.
How did sharks survive the plummeting CO2 levels from their origin in the Ordovician Period (thousands of parts per million) down to near today’s levels in the Carboniferous?
Yet they thrived during this order of magnitude drop, radiating extensively during the Silurian and Devonian Periods.
The real question is how they managed to survive such drastic changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.
G. Max wrote
All the sharks used SCUBA gear until the good times came roaring back. Where do you think Cousteau got the idea in the first place? Don’t those researchers know anything?
(Of course this is all true. You just read it on the internet, didn’t you? Oh, be sure to forward this to ten friends so nothing bad will happen to them.)
But I’m a skeptic, I haven’t got ten friends
Can I NOT send to ten alarmists, so bad things WILL happen to them
We have the sharks to thank for many good things, mostly involving their skin and fins. And maybe their immune systems. But surfers and ship sinking survivors might well wish them all gone the way of their contemporaries, the Class Placodermi, armored fish of the Late Silurian to Late Devonian.
Any group of animals which could survive so much catastrophic climate change, orders of magnitude more drastic than the worst case scenarios imagined by “climate scientists” (except the perfervid imagination of Jim “Venus Express” Hansen), in both fresh and salt water environments, must be doing something right.
So far as I can tell they seem to include reported behaviour of other types of shark.
However, having tried to read the whole paper I am now going to lie down in a dimmed room with a glass of amber liquid and try to forget all the split infinatives.
I think my I.Q. went down 10% just from reading their dribble….and I really can’t afford to lose much !!!!!
Taxpayers should demand back their money which has been squandered on so much idiotic “research” like this.
Poor Sharks.
What a thing to do to them.
Just to inject a little observation into this discussion.
The warming of the Eastern Current of Australia and the subsequent boom in fish stocks has brought sharks into prime littoral swimming beaches.
As pointed out above sharks are the ultimate sea survivors. Recent observational change only confirms this with more sightings and attacks.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/11/11/ballina-shark-attack-shocks-surfing-community
This study confines itself to one harmless migratory species.
The Port Jackson migrates some 800 km in its normal breeding giving it the scope and resilience to adapt to different sea floor conditions.
Despite it being morphologically a living fossil, 300 million years old, it still undergoes molecular evolution.
https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/tutorials/Molecular_evolution_and_neutral_theory24.asp
Which leads to the conclusion that it is adaptive over geological time frames, not tested in the tank model at Adelaide Uni.
As such it may morphologically outlive Man, our species having evolved through fish like ancestors, reflected in our own personal embryological development.
We need not fear for the shark.
There has been some mention here of a bad design in this experiment.
We in Australia cannot afford to spend money on and publish poorly designed scientific work.
In veterinary physiology if you suddenly change the environment of an animal it will immediately compensate and adapt to survive.
Such short term responses cannot be extrapolated to the thousand year time frame implicit in the CO2 global changes predicted by the IPCC.
The temperature range, Ph and CO2 concentrations of water that these sharks experience in their migration and over geological time must encompass what they may adapt to with the projected CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere.
They may even outlive us.
Lewis P Buckingham
The sad thing here is that as Grad-students this is really where they get to practice & learn how to do research. Its where they get to make mistakes. And even publish a paper that is full of errors. You need to make mistakes so you can learn, also you need to be given a “pass” now and then to gain “some self confidence”. The shame is that work like this is put out on the internet as if it was the last word on the subject.
I remember from my university years of some papers I wrote that I am thankful will never see the light of day again!
What these folks have written here is going to follow them the rest of their careers.
They have been shackled with the worst of academic advisers I fear
michael
Ah, let ’em loose on the researchers, preferably at feeding time.
The other fish will be happy to hear this!