From CELL PRESS, a claim that anyone who has ever dealt with fast growing bamboo would have a very hard time believing – see details why at the end of this story.
Climate change may slowly starve bamboo lemurs
Madagascar’s Cat-sized greater bamboo lemurs are considered one of the most endangered primate species on Earth. They almost exclusively eat a single species of bamboo, including the woody trunk, known as culm. But they prefer the more nutritious and tender bamboo shoots and use their specialized teeth to gnaw on culm only when necessary, during the dry season.
Now, reporting in Current Biology on October 26, researchers provide evidence to suggest that as Earth’s climate changes, bamboo lemurs will gradually be forced to eat culm for longer periods. Ultimately, they suggest that, based on an analysis of anatomical, behavioral, paleontological, and climate data, the lemurs could slowly starve.
“For extreme feeding specialists like the greater bamboo lemur, climate change can be a stealthy killer,” says Patricia Wright at Stony Brook University, one of the authors. “Making the lemurs rely on a suboptimal part of their food for just a bit longer may be enough to tip the balance from existence to extinction.”
Wright and her colleagues from Finland and Australia first showed that the greater bamboo lemurs are equipped with highly complex and specialized teeth, just like giant pandas — the only other mammal capable of feeding on culm. These teeth make it possible for them to consume and survive on woody culm for parts of the year.
To find out more about the greater bamboo lemurs’ feeding habits, the researchers spent hours watching them in their natural habitat in Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park over a period of 18 months. They collected more than 2,000 feeding observations in total. Those data showed that the lemurs spend 95 percent of their feeding time eating a single species of woody bamboo. But they only eat the culm from August to November, when dry conditions make tender shoots unavailable.
An analysis of the greater bamboo lemur’s current distribution on the island of Madagascar compared to its distribution in the past, as inferred from fossils, suggests that the lemurs used to live over a broader range. The bamboo lemurs remain only in parts of the island where the dry season is relatively short. In other words, it appears that a short dry season has been crucial to the survival of greater bamboo lemurs in the past.
But the researchers have bad news: climate models suggest that the areas where the lemurs currently are found are likely to experience longer and longer dry seasons in the future. As the lemurs are left with only culm to eat for longer periods, it could put their survival at risk.
The findings may have implications for understanding the fate of bamboo-feeding giant pandas, too, the researchers say. Giant pandas are threatened by deforestation and changes in the distribution of bamboo. But the new data suggest that a changing climate may also endanger bamboo feeders in a more subtle way, by affecting the seasonal availability of preferred and more nutritious bamboo parts. Other animals with highly specialized diets may prove similarly vulnerable.
“By studying specialists like the greater bamboo lemur, we can identify the different ways that climate change can cause extinction,” says author Jukka Jernvall at University of Helsinki. “And if we do not study these endangered species now, they may go extinct before we know all the reasons why, and we’ll be less able to protect what remains.”
The researchers say they now hope that this expanded understanding of the greater bamboo lemurs, together with climate predictions, can be applied to building bamboo corridors, with the goal of connecting isolated lemur populations and expanding their habitats.
###
This study was supported by the Academy of Finland, Stony Brook University, Marie Curie Actions of the European Union, and the Kone Foundation.
Current Biology, Eronen and Zohdy et al.: “Feeding Ecology and Morphology Make a Bamboo Specialist Vulnerable to Climate Change” http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31248-4
Here’s why I think this study is absolute junk:
1. They rely exclusively on climate model projections, and we all know how highly variable those can be with output in the future
2. They seem to have this idea dry seasons In Madagascar will get drier and longer, but we’ve seen climate models produce both outcomes; wetter in the future and drier in the future. Take California for example, we have claims of wetter and drier based on model outcomes. It seems to me they didn’t consider both, focusing only on drier because that’s the one that matches their goal to show bamboo lemurs would be affected.
3. They didn’t actually test any of the preferred bamboo growth and hardiness against the climate models, but instead relied solely on feeding observations of bamboo lemurs.
4. They assume climate change is the only factor, but it seems that other factors have been contributing to the extinction for a long time, even before climate change became a popular boogeyman for extinction. Scientists once believed that it was extinct, but a remnant population was discovered in 1986.See: http://savingspecies.org/projects/past-projects/saving-species-the-bamboo-lemur From that article/proposal:
Prior to the 1970s, greater bamboo lemurs were only known from two sites and following another decade of little research and much forest destruction, it was suspected that P. simus might be extinct.
…
Feared extinct until its rediscovery in 1986, the current status of P. simus is desperate. Surveys of south- and central eastern Madagascar over the past twenty years have found fewer than 75 individuals (with a recent total count of 60). Compared to their historic distribution, the current range is approximately 1 to 4 % of its former range most of which is not suitable habitat due to their dietary specialization on bamboo and microhabitat preferences. In addition, various localities containing critically low population numbers have no official protection and exist in severely degraded landscapes.
Hmmm, it seems “forest destruction” is the bigger threat to the lemurs in the present than climate change could be in the future, and has been for a long time. That’s why in the proposal linked above, they want to purchase the land
5. With the discussion about the bamboo-feeding giant pandas thrown into the press release, the well know heartstring tugging icon of the WWF, it seems they are appealing to human sensitivities, just like the WWF does. From the paper, there’s that deforestation issue again:
In China, compounded with human caused deforestation, changing climate has been suggested to affect bamboo distribution in the 21st century, thereby causing food shortage for the giant panda [23]. Our data suggest that rapidly changing climate may also endanger bamboo feeders in a subtle way by affecting seasonal availability of preferred bamboo parts, and the giant panda may be similarly vulnerable [24].
Deforestation leads to loss of evapotranspiration by the trees and plants of the tropical forest, and that leads to lowered rainfall in the region. Climate change has nothing to do with that effect. See https://www.livescience.com/23017-deforestation-reduces-rainfall.html
Perhaps this PR is just a prelude to a “save the bamboo lemur” organization? It looks like desperation in the form of “we’ll mention climate change and people will send money, yeah, that’s the ticket!”.
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When it suits their nefarious purposes, CACA adherents claim that AGW will increase precipitation. When it serves their antihuman ends, then just the opposite.
But let’s look at the data. Here are January temperature and rainfall figures for Madagascar by time period:
1901-1930: 24.9 degrees C & 252 mm
1931-1960: 24.3 degrees C & 273 mm
1961-1990: 24.4 degrees C & 284.7 mm
1991-2015: 27.4 degrees C & 300.5 mm
http://sdwebx.worldbank.org/climateportal/index.cfm?page=country_historical_climate&ThisRegion=Africa&ThisCCode=MDG
How much is the effect of “global warming” and how much of deforestation, urbanization and other land use changes is debatable, as is the accuracy of recent temperature “data”. But clearly, a warmer Madagascar is a wetter island.
For most periods, January has been the wettest month, followed by Feb, Dec and March.
The driest month, September, has however seen rainfall drop from 34.7 mm in 1901-30 to 27.7 mm in 1991-2015. But it had already fallen to 30.5 mm in 1931-60 and 32.2 mm in 1961-90.
What is relevant is rainfall and available moisture in the few remaining bamboo forest tracts occupied by the greater bamboo lemurs. Dunno how well the soil of the these isolated tracts holds water, but the heavier recent rainfall in the wet season must help compensate for a drier dry season.
Ok, the Finns who were part of the study might have an excuse, but their colleagues in Australia ought to be sent up here to the Dry Tropics and be forced to dig up at least 10m2 of running bamboo each, without using any heavy equipment or explosives. After they have admitted their folly they can buy a reciprocating saw ($A159) and a minimum of 30 5 tpa HC blades ($A210).
The greater bamboo lemurs eats, shoots, roots, and leaves !
crap…… even the lemurs have guns !!
Streetcred,
Koalas do the same.
Bamboo eating lemurs on Madagascar 🇲🇬 have a very real problem – deforestation. It is irrelevant to invoke imaginary pseudo-problems such as the outcomes of rigged climate computer games.
Forest 🌳 destruction on Madagascar is due to poverty and subsistence living on < 2 dollars a day. Like in Haiti. This refutes the meme of anti-capitalist CO2 warmism. Economic development that would lift Madagascar’s population out of poverty requires low cost reliable electricity. This means coal and gas power stations.
Coal and gas power stations give the added advantage of enriching the atmosphere with CO2 the greening, life-giving gas.
China is the country with by far the most success in lifting its population out of poverty. This has been done by making hundreds of coal, gas and nuclear power stations.
Wealth from well managed capitalistic growth provides people with the resources to protect their environment and the economic and cultural space to allow them to care about things other than day-to-day survival, such as conservation.
Economic and cultural growth also slows and eventually stops population expansion. This also relieves pressure on forests and the natural environment.
Environment and biodiversity are preserved by well managed capitalistic economic and cultural growth, which are indivisible from low cost reliable fossil fuel powered electricity. Not by hate-filled malthusian anti-capitalistic, anti-everything CAGW activism based on fraudulent bogus pseudo-science.
The boundary of a forest reserve in Madagascar shows that correct application of economic resources can stop deforestation:
https://goo.gl/images/EWKvFQ
Grant chasing , it shows the AGW bucket is still well filled.
We will known the game is up when there is longer any point in trying to play this game.
There’s more than Lemurs and bamboo to worry about in Madagascar. The Black Death plague might also rate some news. Two-thirds of the plague cases in Madagascar are pneumonic – the much deadlier, airborne form of the disease, which is as infectious as flu.
(It is estimated that around 50 million people in Europe died of the Black Death in the Middle Ages).
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/south-africa-high-risk-black-death-plague-outbreak-spreading-madagascar-1644650
According to modelling, pigs with the ability to fly will evolve at some point in the next million years, in response to the need to travel further to find water in a drier climate. With a larger research grant, it should be possible to improve this estimate of the evolutionary time frame to within +/- 100,000 years.
With a large enough grant, the T. Rex and Allosaurus species could be revived from DNA samples retrieved from Triassic bees stuck in amber, with the addition of DNA from female African frogs that can clone themselves.
I only need $6.565 million, one handsome, muscular paleontologist assistant with a thing for hats, and sprinkler system for my back yard.
How terribly exhausting…
No control.
No years of 24/7/365 recorded observations.
Multiple assumptions based on minimal fragmentary information and personal bias.
Suggest is such a definitive science word.
“Suggest” as used, is the basis for imaginary results used as absolute prophecy for beliefs.
So, Pandas, Lemurs and by extremely vague association other animals feeding on sole source foods are suddenly in danger from “climate change”. In reality, the actual causes are deforestation and habitat losses caused by humans.
More waffle words allowing the researchers to claim any result within their advocacy.
What is unclear is how these solely bamboo dependent animals survive bamboo’s regular flowering periods?
On much longer scales, these animals survived glaciations, glacial retreats, droughts and floods. Though, those events preceded mankind mowing down forests.
With dreadful confirmation bias science such as these characters provide, nothing is learned and when animals end up extinct, nothing of their demise will actually be known.
More researchers taking trips to exotic locales; i.e. Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park.
I could use some money to fund a study on how many chia pets could be successfully started with just one box of quinoa salad seeds.
They neglected to dial in the important positive response by bamboo to increasing CO2. In the case of this particular type of plant, the response is much greater. Woody stemmed plants have a greater to much greater positive response to elevated CO2 levels compared to plants that aren’t woody stemmed.
Could only find one study but with CO2 elevated by 300 ppm. The increase in plant dry weight(biomass) was 72%.
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/a/aulonemiaa.php
Also, plants are more water efficient with elevated CO2 levels, so in the event of a longer dry season, one would expect the bamboo to do better with a higher atmospheric CO2 vs a lower CO2 and that same longer dry season.
If these critters were terribly sensitive to climate change they’d already be extinct. There has never been a time when the climate hasn’t changed. That part of climate science is actually settled.