Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Snow hares – fluffy, cute, less likely to eat you than a Polar Bear. The ideal candidate for the next green icon, except for their distressing lack of rarity, and their unfortunate ability to adapt to changes in their environment.
Can Evolution Save Snow Hares From Climate Change?
Species go extinct unless they can adapt to changes to their environment. And while the climate change caused by humans is often viewed as a future threat to wildlife, it’s already having a measurable impact on species today.
One potential casualty of climate change is the snowshoe hare. A close relative of rabbits, the hare’s hind feet (its ‘snowshoes’) have a large surface area to stop it sinking into snow. It also has another adaptation for life in North America: the animal’s brown summer coat turns white in winter, providing camouflage to hide it from predators.
…
“This is one of the most direct demonstrations of mortality costs for a wild species facing climate change,” [L Scott] Mills said in a press release. And while snowshoe hares aren’t currently endangered, the biologists predict that the higher death rate will lead to a significant drop in population levels by the end of the century.
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But the chances of extinction can be minimized by a conservation strategy called ‘evolutionary rescue’: if a population is made-up of a large variety of individuals, it will have a deep gene pool, maximizing the likelihood that at least some individuals carry a genetic variant that would help them to survive and reproduce. This would enable a population to adapt through natural selection. For hares, this means individuals with genes that make them molt at times which match snow cover (it’s unknown whether they would be able to adapt in time).
Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/01/29/snow-hare-climate-change/
The abstract of Scott’s study;
Anthropogenic climate change has created myriad stressors that threaten to cause local extinctions if wild populations fail to adapt to novel conditions. We studied individual and population-level fitness costs of a climate change-induced stressor: camouflage mismatch in seasonally colour molting species confronting decreasing snow cover duration. Based on field measurements of radiocollared snowshoe hares, we found strong selection on coat colour molt phenology, such that animals mismatched with the colour of their background experienced weekly survival decreases up to 7%. In the absence of adaptive response, we show that these mortality costs would result in strong population-level declines by the end of the century. However, natural selection acting on wide individual variation in molt phenology might enable evolutionary adaptation to camouflage mismatch. We conclude that evolutionary rescue will be critical for hares and other colour molting species to keep up with climate change.
Read more: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12568/full
The main thrust of Scott’s point seems to be the need for a healthy, diverse population. But imagine if Scott’s findings apply to other species? Could it be possible, that species are capable of adapting to altered conditions, through natural selection, and that a couple of degrees of global warming isn’t quite the catastrophic threat we’ve been led to believe?
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From the press release: “(climate change) it’s already having a measurable impact on species today.”
What a baseless piece of conjecture that was. For something that’s apparently so “measurable” I notice no actual measurements! Hares in Canada experience a 70 degree temperature range in one single year but are being negatively affected by an increase of some fraction of a degree over many generations?
Have these people ever been outside? Or read anything related to biology? Or anything at all besides “Grant writing for Dummies?”
Remember, everyone has less because the state took what was yours and gave it to these nincompoops. The Academic bubble can’t burst soon enough. So many real problems going wanting while fools take our money and give us nothing in return.
well said.
Gee, I wonder why the rabbits hair turns brown in the summer. Wouldnt be for camouflage would it?
From polar bears on the tundra.
Maybe polar bears will learn to change colour too so they can sneak up on the rabbits.
Could turn out all white.
jackbenimble333 bunny plagues = easy breakfasts for coyotes = more . . . I see a problem developing here . . .
Environmentalist are killing the Snowshoe Hares!!!!!!!!!!!!!
About 8-10 years ago declining snowshoe hares was a big issue in far upstate New York in the Adirondacks. Yes, the were blaming climate change.
However, a study by the Adirondack Ecological Center – “Factors Regulating a Declining Snowshoe Hare Population” – Meg Klepack (Sorry the link is long dead) found that the reason for the decline of the bunnies was in fact because of the decline in logging.
Snowshoe hares require underbrush for cover, and underbrush is something old growth Adirondack Boreas forest doesn’t naturally provide much of. However, areas that have been logged do and in the past the snowshoe hare population thrived alongside a thriving logging industry.
The environmentalist in New York have been successful in significantly curtailing logging and as such the Snowshoe hare population has declined.
A famous magician once pulled a rabbit out of his hat.
For an encore, he pulled a hare out of his ass.
Progressivists don’t give a rat’s patootie about individuals, only classifications. They abduct healthy wolves from Quebec and drop them in Colorado to be shot. They hang tracking devices on penguins, oblivious to the fact that such devices reduce the wearer’s survival prospects and make them unattractive to potential mates. They do these things not from empathy, but because they want to know what everything that moves is doing when they’re not around.
Those who imagine themselves gods are, naturally, control freaks.
At the risk of stating the obvious:
There’s a reason it’s called “NATURAL selection”
They don’t need your help, you idiots.
Information science is proving Darwinian evolution by natural selection as utterly false.
Problem: random mutation is far more likely to create errors than beneficial changes.
ie 1/ 100,000,000,000,000,000 (one in 100 trillion for a 12 character sequence)
I can prove it.
Take this sentence:
Biology is an occupation for the weakest of the science-minded investigators.
There are 78 characters, including spaces.
Let us say that we want to change it by darwinian random change, to:
Biology is an occupation for the greatest of the science-minded investigators.
That requires the change of 3 character in the right places:
[space] -> g
w -> r
k -> t
Amongst you biology “scientists”. Can you do the math to show the probability that this would happen.
While you drool over the paper and fail to do this simple calculation, consider how many examples of gibberish would be created before you got the second sentence.
Actual answer to be posted later…I’ll let the dummy biologists TRY to cipher it for a while.
How do you change the space to g and retain it without increasing the number to 79 characters.
I suggest you count the characters (you obviously didn’t) ..hint there is an extra space before the word “weakest”. There are 77, not including the extra space. 🙂 78 account for an extra space. HA! I can’t account for wysiwyg kerning in wordpress particularly with bolds, non-bolds, spaces and font selection.
I knew some tedious person would criticize the question rather than answer the question. You must be a biologist, incapable of doing simple math.
In a broader sense it doesn’t really matter anyway, if you understand the nature of the question.
So since you can’t count, it is likely you can’t calculate the odds either. BUT I bet you 20 bucks you still BELIEVE in random variation as the mechanism within natural selection.
Hint #1,
26 lower case letters
26 upper case letters
[space], hyphen, period
55 possible characters
any letters can change in random variation
Each of the 78 letters can change
Only 3 change.
Hint #2
for a single change…
1/78 that [space] changes, 1/55 that it changes to g.= 1/4290
[The mods are trying to figure out if this means it is always faster to misspell words, or that it is a miracle that any words are spelled correctly in the first place. .mod]
Appreciate the scathing analysis following a dramatic sidestep worthy of a true alarmist to a reasonable question.
Do have a nice day.
No further comment
mods,
sinse I rarely speel w0rds proparli y3t eye am a d3zignar uf thee unf0rmasion, thear most bee somth1g intrinzic inn da n@atur3 off za deezein. In my case, I am certain it is miraculous.
🙂
Hint #3
Once one character is changed, you don’t need to consider that one again.The same principle is true for the 3rd character.
Not so for the character itself. They are independent events.
you tube.com/watch?v=xSc4oLA9e8o
Eric Worrall,
I remember way back when (maybe early 1970’s) where there was a moth in England that had been white or light colored, turned darker because of the pollution and soot. When the pollution in London was cleaned up, the moth became lighter again.
Of course, moths can evolve faster than hares, but it certainly could happen.
What would most likely happen is that the range of regular brown rabbits would increase northward.
Re: Worrall, Climate Alarmists Discover Natural Selection, 1/30/2016
What do you get when you cross one species of Post Modern Science with another? You get pseudoscientific claptrap like that of Zimova, (Scott) Mills, and Nowak, linked from Worrall. The article uses the phrases Anthropogenic climate change, evolution, and natural selection in new and unsubstantiated ways.
Anthropogenic climate change is the first three words of the paper, displayed at the top in the abstract. The phrase appears again as a conclusion immediately following the opening paragraph, which claims, background ‘natural’ stressors are now being exacerbated by myriad new human-induced challenges occurring on a global scale and at rapid rates. The paper treats this unmeasurable phenomenon as fact, then bases its predictions of snowshoe hare population growth on estimates of snow cover. And where those estimates come from a previous paper by co-author Mills where future snow cover is based on two IPCC emission scenarios.
In science, a fact may be defined as an observation reduced by measurements and compared with standards (Popper’s metaphysical facts being an oxymoron.) Anthropogenic climate change demonstrated by computer programs, much less by such programs designed to evidence anthropogenic climate change, is not fact, and if a scientists must address it, he should do so as an unambiguous assumption, never fact.
The emission scenarios applied in the papers are RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, representing increased radiative forcing by year 2100 of 4.5 and 8.5 Wm-2. As senior reviewer George Simpson, Head, MetOffice, told Guy Callendar (honored as inventor of the Callendar Effect, i.e., the Greenhouse Effect), it was impossible to solve the problem of the temperature distribution in the atmosphere by working out the radiation. That is as true today as it was in 1938, a fact which IPCC has managed to confirm with its GCM 95% confidence that the ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity) will be greater than 1ºC for a doubling of CO2. Scientists now estimate ECS from satellite measurements at less than 1ºC, a 5% confidence event. (The situation is far worse because what is measured is CO2 lagging temperature, not leading it as the ECS definition requires.) Again as Simpson told Callendar, The atmosphere was not in a state of radiative equilibrium. It never is, especially in the scientific sense of thermodynamic equilibrium.
The thesis of Zimova, et al., depends on snow cover, independent of whether it has a human-induced component. The adjective anthropogenic is purely superfluous, and a sharp reviewer would have struck it by a simple application of Occam’s Razor. For an in-depth discussion of the use and misuse of the Razor, see WUWT, Is climate forecasting immune from Occam’s razor?, 12/12/2015.
Nevertheless, the whole AGW movement has plowed ahead, notwithstanding misfortunes accumulated by the model. To make matters worse, Mills projected snow cover from measurements taken between 1970 and 1999, extrapolated using the emission scenarios. That brief time span of 29 years, just shy of a minimum climate cycle, were immediately followed by the celebrated, on-going hiatus, a period of about zero warming simultaneous with unrelenting CO2 emissions for almost the same duration. The best of the AR5 scenarios to use might have been RCP2.8, where IPCC models radiative forcing in decline from a 2030 peak of 3 Wm-2.
The evolutionary side of Zimova, et al., fairs no better than the climate side. The problem starts with the opening sentence: Organisms have always been subjected to biotic and abiotic changes in their environment that forced them to either move or adapt in situ to avoid extinction. In no ordinary meaning of force can life, absent intelligence, be compelled to move or adapt. That is especially so in response to weather, much less climate change. Even humans will live, reproduce, and die tragically in flood planes year after year, and even increase the population at risk when given government insurance. Or in the path of volcanic eruptions (e.g. Mount Rainier; Yellowstone), or under threat of earthquakes and their hazards (California, Chile), or fires (California, Australia). Other forms of life have no way willfully to change their habits or genetics in response to their environment, including climate or predation. A population already inclined to drift might flourish in one environment over another, but that is a matter of accident, a diversity of behavior that made the race (variety or species) viable in the first place. And so it is with inheritance, too. Accidental variations will change the growth rate of any race, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. Some might call such changes coincident with environmental events forcings, but that is a colloquialism, not the discipline of language science demands.
The suggestion by Zimova that species can be forced to change is in keeping with Darwin’s version of Natural Selection. But a better name for his invention is Supernatural Selection, since by modeling it after man’s selective breeding, he gave NS the power to accumulate favorable genetic changes, and to give those accumulated changes a direction by which to improve fitness and to win in the battle for survival. Certainly Darwin cannot be faulted for anthropomorphizing natural selection and for relying on intelligent design in 1859. The philosophy of science and even biology were in turmoil in the 19th Century, driven by the successes of Mendel against blended inheritance, and in physics from Dalton to Carnot to Joule to Maxwell. It’s past time to recognize Darwin 2.0 in which natural selection is reckoned as the mathematical consequence of saturated niches and the crowding of races. For more discussion of Darwin 2.0, (and heated negative reaction), see WUWT, Hot news, evolution cools, 3/17/15.
On the next page, Zimova claims to quantify natural selection by measured and estimated population growth rates statistically linked to camouflage mismatch in snow. The authors claim to have demonstrated that selection against mismatch is capable of causing considerable population declines. We conclude that evolutionary rescue represents a critically important process to avert population declines due to future camouflage mismatch.
The authors did demonstrate that camouflage mismatch caused population declines. But they have demonstrated neither Darwin, 1.0 or 2.0, natural selection, nor evolution. Population size and the distribution of phenotypes are ordinary topics of population ecology, and may be due to environmental changes or genetic drift. They account for the observations and predictions in Zimova, but they do not necessarily involve genetic evolution.
hares change coat colors could be good proxy to calibrate tree ring samples.
Next study project.