Coping with climate stress in Antarctica
Some polar fish can cope with warming or ocean acidification, but not both together
Some Antarctic fish living in the planet’s coldest waters are able to cope with the stress of rising carbon dioxide levels the ocean. They can even tolerate slightly warmer waters. But they can’t deal with both stressors at the same time, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
The study, published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, of emerald rockcod is the first to show that Antarctic fishes may make tradeoffs in their physiology and behavior to cope with ocean acidification and warming waters.
(The research is described in a web feature, “The Last Stop,” at the UC Davis Science & Climate website.)
“In dealing with climate stress, these fish are really bad multi-taskers,” said senior author Anne Todgham, an associate professor with the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. “They seem quite capable of coping with increases in CO2, and they can compensate for some warming. But they can’t deal with both stressors at the same time. That’s a problem because those things happen together–you don’t get CO2 dissolving in the ocean independent of warming.”
TRADEOFFS
Antarctic fishes live in water that is typically about -1.9C (28.6F). At their field site in Antarctica, the authors exposed emerald rockcod to two temperatures: -1 degree Celsius (30F) and 2 degrees Celsius (36F). The latter is the threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. They also exposed the fish to treatments of three different levels of CO2 ranging from ambient to elevated projected levels.
Increased CO2 levels by themselves had little impact on the fish. After a couple of weeks, heart, ventilation and metabolic rates increased with warming. Their behavior also changed with warming. The fish swam less and preferred dark zones, which suggests they were attempting to conserve energy. Then after 28 days, juvenile rockcod were able to compensate for the warming temperatures. However, this temperature compensation only happened in the absence of rising CO2.
NO COLDER PLACES TO GO
While some species are beginning to shift to cooler places to escape warming habitats, polar fish have no colder places to go. They have to cope by using their existing physiology, which the study shows is limited.
Emerald rockcod help form the basis of the Antarctic food web, supporting an ecosystem of species such as Emperor penguins and seals.
“The Antarctic has contributed very little to the production of greenhouse gases, and yet it’s one of the places on the planet receiving the most impact,” Todgham said. “I feel we have responsibility to care about the spaces that are so fragile. If we can provide reservoirs of areas that are less stressful to plants and animals through protecting natural places, we can buy ourselves some time to deal with things like climate change that will take a long time to get in line.”
###
The study’s authors include lead author and Ph.D student Brittany Davis, Erin Flynn and Nann Fangue of UC Davis, Frederick Nelson of UC Davis and Howard University; and Nathan Miller from San Francisco State University.
The study was funded through grants from the Division of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation, and University of California Agricultural Experiment Station.
Added: Here is the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13987/full
The above is the press release from Eurekalert, which conveniently left out this passage from the “feature” at UCDavis:
Back at the research station, Todgham and her team place the eggs and juveniles in plastic buckets with water that is 2 degrees Celsius, a temperature scientists predict will be the norm in 80 years. Researchers pump in various levels of CO2 via colorful tubes that snake in and out of each bucket.
For several weeks, Todgham measures how the fish cope. She looks at gene expression, the cellular stress response, metabolic changes and physiological factors like activity level and growth rates.
“We’re trying to predict how each species will cope with warmer water and higher CO2 emissions,” Todgham said.
The short answer: not well.
As anyone who has ever owned a saltwater aquarium and tried to keep it alive without crashing can tell you, a tank, let alone a plastic bucket, is a far cry from the actual ocean.
Of course these sci-fi kids don’t seem to understand that switching the environment from the sea to a plastic bucket is a stressor in and of itself. Further, the speed at which the water temperature change is induced on these hapless creatures removes any possibility of a long term natural adaptations. Let’s reduce 80+ years of predicted climate change induced ocean temperature and posited pH change to a few days in a bucket, without accounting for that change of environment, yeah, that’s the ticket.
I mean seriously, this is peer-reviewed science? This isn’t even at the junior science fair level.
Then there’s this:
Polar fish have nowhere colder to go, but so far, it looks like other species have not migrated in to their ecosystem. Antarctica is ringed by a circumpolar current that acts like a barrier, so it would not be easy for aquatic creatures to migrate in.
“Except for the crabs,” Todgham says. “It looks like they can enter by marching along the bottom.”
Gosh, a current is a “barrier” to fish? They can’t swim in water with a current? According to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the speed of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is pretty low:
It is a very cold current with temperatures ranging from –1 to 5°C depending on the time of the year, and with speeds up to 2 knots (2.3 miles per hour or 3.7 km per hour). This is the same speed as a brisk walk. Antarctica is also the birthplace of deep ocean waters that make up part of the global Ocean Conveyor.
It’s more likely that fish at warmer southern hemisphere latitudes don’t like the subfreezing water near Antarctica and aren’t equipped with the cellular antifreeze to deal with it. So, they don’t go there.
The stupid, it burns.
You think that’s bad, watch the video they produced which due to the number of smiling headshots and irrelevant imagery of seals and penguins looks more like “my grant sponsored summer vacation in Antarctica“.
UPDATE: This is a curious development, within 30 minutes of publication of this critique, it seems the press release has disappeared. (h/t to David Middleton)
This was the original link: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/uoc%E2%80%93cwc011618.php
That link now gives:
Page not found.
The page you are looking for has moved. Please go to the main EurekAlert! homepage to locate the section you are interested in and reset your bookmarks.
For further assistance, please contact webmaster@eurekalert.org.
I still had my browser window open showing it in the daily feed, you can see it right at the top in this screencap:
That’s gone missing from Eurekalert too:
https://www.eurekalert.org/bysubject/atmospheric.php
The feature at UCDavis still exists though:
http://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/news/theres-nowhere-colder-go/
And you can still see the press release in Google cache:
UPDATE2: I received this reply from the UC davis Press office (email redacted to prevent spamming):
Andy Fell <ahfell@xxxxxx.xxx>
To
CC
Hi Anthony,
For logistical reasons we are issuing the news release tomorrow. I think it may have inadvertently appeared briefly on Eurekalert, but it should be up there tomorrow.
The original paper can be found here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13987/full
Thanks,
Andy
—
Andy Fell
Communications Manager
Biological sciences, physical sciences, engineering & police
UC Davis News & Media Relations
UPDATE3: I missed this the first time around, but this is really the fatal flaw in the study. As water temperature increases, CO2 solubility becomes less. See the reference curve for CO2 solubility in distilled and seawater comparing temperature and Chloride concentration:
This is long established in chemistry and is indisputable, so the elevated levels of CO2 they are testing with would not naturally occur. I also believe that water under the sea ice would have far less interaction with the atmosphere, and would not be prone to dissolving as much CO2 compared to open water.
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Okay, okay, okay! Stop!!!
Do any of these so-called researchers EVER take into account how many species of fish have gone out of business in the past 180,000 years, never mind the past 65,000,000?
(No. I doubt sincerely that they have even a clue about that.)
Why were there no other species of cod included in this juvenile attempt to harm fish?
(Hint: no point in using other species when the experiment is specious to begin with.)
Has this individual taken any time to consider studying snow crab or king crab from Alaska, and why there are so many now, making crab so cheap?
(Hint: crab predators have been greatly reduced in numbers by overfishing).
This is a fine example of flawed research. Species come and go constantly. This is a lame attempt at creating a panic over nothing, a tempest in a plastic pail, a hollow-man result. There is nothing to it, and she should have been told to do it right or not do it at all. She knows nothing about fish.
Her results should be marked up with lots of check marks and yellow post-its, noting the flaws in the paper. How much grant money was she expecting to get for this bad piece of work, anyway? I’ll bet she doesn’t like being criticized, not one bit.
I totally agree. I’m so tired of reading about such shoddy experiments! Sheesh, when even the average internet denizen can pierce your thought bubble, it must have been pretty weak indeed.
Though…this makes it all the more pleasant when you do come across fantastically designed experiments. I watched one on quantum entanglement a while back that was fabulous. Basically a full 60 minutes explaining the precise, “paranoid” (her words, not mine), manner in which the experiment was designed. If these climate scientists were even half as hard on themselves and a tenth as rigorous as that particular physicist was, the difference in our knowledge basis would render our current understanding as infantile.
rip
By only using one fish, does this make them a Specious Specist?
sporadically
I don’t know if it’s speciesist, but it is very, very BAD science.
This is yet more junk science in search of a lucrative future grant. These people should be prevented from torturing poor defenceless Polar fish by confining them to plastic buckets and test tanks. This is inhumane treatment in pursuit of senseless science.
#Rock cod lives matter!!!!
Plus many.
As others have said, this is pathetic – anybody with at least half a brain would have refused to have their name associated with it. But my question is this: Do funders know what sort of drivel (I’m being polite here) they may have supported?
Unless funding is unlimited, one would think that funders would want to get the biggest bang possible for their bucks. Certainly if I were in charge of grants, I would use my red pen to draw a line through the names of anybody who was in any way associated with this!
My work requires me to follow AGW issues and occasionally pronounce upon them, and for a long time my lack of a science background made me very nervous. But over time it’s become clear that a reasonably bright ten-year-old would ask questions a lot of “researchers” couldn’t honestly answer and as the movement is overtaken by “it’s now or never” panic, it all gets worse, not better. Warmer water = more dissolved CO2? Do these ninnies think we’re all that ignorant? Or did the preconceived experimental result just seem too attractive to bother with such trifling details??
Incredible. ‘Fubar’ is absolutely appropriate for this.
I knew an expert on Antarctic fish physiology. Worked on some of the early Antarctic science projects. One test of the paper would be to see if any references predated about 1995. Could not get the references.
Don’t know much about these, but they are very specialized, some with a type of anti-freeze, possibly not easy to get rid of. Also cold adapted enzymes. Tolerance range very narrow so their experimental conclusion could be a partial reason. More important than “Stressor-induced energetic trade-offs in physiology and behavior may be an important mechanism leading to vulnerability of Antarctic fishes to future ocean change.” I think we already knew that. Certainly important to be very careful with experimentally. Not very large changes in percentages found but very large changes in temperature relative to their tolerance range. This is really dumb–“Antarctica is nearly 9,000 miles from California, but in terms of environmental changes, it is right next door.”
He then became an expert on subtropical/temperate fish physiology, much more adaptable types.
The sad thing is that the scientific bar has dropped so low in the last 2 decades, that the (lack of) quality of science in this study is not a shock or aberration anymore.
It’s more like……….ok, here’s another one.
Did anyone add cesium137, strontium 90, plutonium, and the thousands of other isotopes Fukushima-Daiichi NPP dumps by the millions of tonnes into the Pacific STILL, or is this just a biology department scheme to extract more money out of the treasury, as I suspect? Nobody ever wants to discuss the nuclear elephant in the room for 24,000 more years, dammit.
Until comments like this approach reality, why bother? You claim “millions of tonnes” and expect to be taken seriously?
And ice melts at what temperature, with transfer of how much latent heat? And might that have an effect on future temperatures in Antarctica?
I guess I shouldn’t be too appalled that wannabe ‘climate scientists’ don’t appear to know anything about the physical properties of water. Only yesterday WUWT had an article where some of the climate-concerned demonstrated they didn’t know basic the basic mathematics of how area of a circle scales with the square of radius while the circumference only scales linearly with radius. The calibre of the people practising this faith is lamentable.
I decided to something on behalf of the green rock cod, and looked up California’s anti-cruelty laws and it seems that they are rather strict.
“According to CPC 597, it is a crime to “kill, intentionally maim, physically harm, torture, neglect, or overwork an animal.” The code can also lead to imprisonment, a fine or both, if found guilty of the crime.”
A person can serve up to a year in county jail and fines can reach up to $20,000 if convicted of a misdemeanor. A felony for animal abuse can reach up to six months, and as much as three years in state prison and a similar maximum fine amount.
http://www.abc10.com/news/local/california/be-aware-animal-abuse-and-cruelty-laws-in-california/459994631
As is true in most states, animal abuse is regarded with a stink eye in California, and while those penalties may seem severe, they aren’t. They are worse in Illinois because of the number of dogs picked up who have been abandoned because they wouldn’t fight.
I think Ms. Todgham and her ‘team’ need a sharp setdown about what they did, which includes breaking those very animal abuse laws.
For some reason, I can’t read “green rock cod” without thinking that it nearly says something very rude about the alleged researchers from UC Davis. Perhaps I am just borderline dyslexic, or maybe the carbon dioxide is getting to me.
“Antarctic fishes live in water that is typically about -1.9C (28.6F). At their field site in Antarctica, the authors exposed emerald rockcod to two temperatures: -1 degree Celsius (30F) and 2 degrees Celsius (36F). The latter is the threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.” Notice the complete irrelevant non sequitur of the last sentence, in the context?
Oh Co2, see your fate in yon White Cliffs of Dover,
Purple Rock Cod, your trial will soon be over.
About that “oceanic acidification” meme – hoping someone can explain how the oceans sustained massive reefs and an enormous biomass for the hundreds of millions of years that atmospheric CO2 was 10 – 16 times pre-industrial? I’m absolutely serious: how do they explain it?
When these things get exposed I sit and wonder why I went into industry and had to work so hard. I had no idea all I had to do was drag out one of my old science fair projects and BOOM! PhD! This got far more attention than it should have and U.C. Davis, Shame!
“Antarctic fishes live in water that is typically about -1.9C (28.6F). At their field site in Antarctica, the authors exposed emerald rockcod to two temperatures: -1 degree Celsius (30F) and 2 degrees Celsius (36F). The latter is the threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”
Odd, I get the difference between -1,9 and +2 degrees to be 3.9 degrees, not 2 degrees.
“While some species are beginning to shift to cooler places to escape warming habitats, polar fish have no colder places to go.”
No, and they won’t need to since it is very unlikely that the AABW that is at -1.9C will get any warmer. That temperature is determined by the fact that it is the temperature at which the surface water becomes dense enough to sink. The air above the polynyas that cools the water until it sinks comes off the antarctic continent due to catabatic winds and is vastly colder. AABW can only get warmer by becoming denser and sinking at a higher temperature which is only possible if it should somehow become much saltier. The other possibility is that production of AABW would somehow stop, which requires that the East Antarctic Icecap disappears first.
It’s only slightly off topic, but this is a request for information, if anyone knows about it.
We’re always reading about the dreaded
reduction in alkalinityacidification of the oceans, as something that’s going on now, expected to get worse due to RCP 8.5 and with the standard corollary “we’re all gonna die” or something equally unpleasant.Is anyone aware of actual pH measurements, widely distributed in space and time, showing how ocean pH has varied? I’m too
busylazy to go looking for such data myself================
Changing topic again: I’m not sure that you can quote Henry’s law for CO2 dissolved in sea water and say you’ve finalized the argument. Most of the CO2 in sea water is actually in the form of bicarbonate ions, and not a dissolved gas.There will be separate equilibria between CO2 in air, CO2 in water and bicarbonate in water. A complex and fairly well buffered system, and you probably can’t ignore the variation in cation species as well on the overall ability of sea water to hold CO2 at different temperatures. There are also carbonate ions and undissociated carbonic acid (H2CO3), but bicarbonate dominates between pH’s of 6.3 and 10.3 and these other species both reach their minima at pH 8.3 (which is about the normal pH of sea water and this is presumably not a coincidence). A good inorganic chemist should be able to give an analysis of the change with temperature, without the need for laboratory experiments.
Indeed. Also my question re: why it’s supposedly such a problem given what we know about pre-industrial CO2 levels. Presupposing there even IS detectable acidification, which given the track record of mendacity on the part of the alarmists I’m hardly taking for granted.
My big problem with “ocean acidification” by CO2 rests with the observation that carbonated drinks are very popular. They are suffused with CO2 … what is the pH of (club) soda water?
Apparently about 3 or 4 (https://tinyurl.com/yc39bspf), but of course the CO2 concentration is far higher than anything possible in nature. From Wikipedia:
“Commercial soda water in siphons is made by chilling filtered plain water to 8 °C (46 °F) or below, optionally adding a sodium or potassium based alkaline compound such as sodium bicarbonate to reduce acidity, and then pressurizing the water with carbon dioxide. The gas dissolves in the water, and a top-off fill of carbon dioxide is added to pressurize the siphon to approximately 120 pounds per square inch (830 kPa), some 30 to 40 psi (210–280 kPa) higher than is present in fermenting champagne bottles.”
“That’s a problem because those things happen together–you don’t get CO2 dissolving in the ocean independent of warming.”
WHAT?! Water temperature increases = more CO2 LEAVING the ocean, NOT “dissolving” in it!! Didn’t these idiots ever drink a soda after it got warm?!
“Antarctic fishes live in water that is typically about -1.9C (28.6F). At their field site in Antarctica, the authors exposed emerald rockcod to two temperatures: -1 degree Celsius (30F) and 2 degrees Celsius (36F). The latter is the threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”
WHAT?! If these fish live in water that is typically -1.9C, then the “threshold for global warming that the Paris Agreement targets to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change” (their “two degree” meme) added to that would be +0.01C, NOT 2.0C, which would be 3.9C above the “current” water temperature they live in, or about DOUBLE the “catastrophe” threshold according to the Climate Fascists. What is this, “Mannian” math?!”
And while we’re on this subject, who the hell said that the WATER temperature was a “threshold” that was the topic of discussion? It’s the “atmospheric” (i.e., AIR) temperature that they’re “worried” about, they have made no related prediction about the effect of such on the OCEAN temperature.
What a load of twaddle!
+0.1C (typo)
“The Antarctic has contributed very little to the production of greenhouse gases, and yet it’s one of the places on the planet receiving the most impact,”
OBJECTION – assertion of “facts” not in evidence.
“Back at the research station, Todgham and her team place the eggs and juveniles in plastic buckets with water that is 2 degrees Celsius, a temperature scientists predict will be the norm in 80 years.”
More wild speculation based on the “fantasy model world.” Oh, and if Antarctic water temperatures are climbing, that would be the undersea volcanoes, NOT the non-existent “greenhouse gas catastrophe” that is to blame. And WE aren’t going to be able to stop it.
“The stupid, it burns.” – Best summation of this whole thing. Somebody paid MONEY for this “Ship High In Transit?!”
I have noticed that some sciences have assumed an “astrology” type aspect. What this means is that an astrologer will make 20 claims, one of which turns out valid. He / She has no idea prior to the predictions which ones are correct. No failure or series of failures means anything about the astrologer. Real science operates by refutation. 20 predictions are made and if one if wrong then the whole theory is Kaput.
Science is a brutal world that way. Climate science is clearly in the astrologer camp. They make these predictions thousands of times. I have no idea how many species will die theories we’ve seen over the last 30 years but a lot. To my knowledge, none of them has panned out. The seals, plankton, polar bears and numerous other creatures are doing fine if not better than ever recorded before. We were going to suffer from Malaria due to global warming. We now have a much better vaccine in just the last year. Oops that prediction down.
So, who knows. Maybe as some have said the cod can evolve or maybe the experiment was flawed and the cod never see a problem. Maybe this particular cod dies but is replaced by a plethora of other cods or other fish. This is much more complicated than the article says.
If I were doing this science above the first thing is to state the assumptions and things that could invalidate this theory. What are the imperfections of my experiment and how does it differ from the real world? How have similar studies fared and the flaws with them. Has anybody duplicated this experiment? Where is the breakpoint where the fish seem to catastrophically die and why?
Of course, none of this in there because this is junk science. It’s all junk science. It’s obvious to anyone with any actual science background.
As Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame pointed out, there have been zero human-caused extinctions in the last half-century, so I’m mot too worried about the cod. Come to think of it, I’m not too worried about much of anything… except maybe the warning of Vaclav Klaus:
“We’ll be the victims of irrational ideology. They will try to dictate to us how to live, what to do, how to behave. What to eat, how to travel, and what my children should have. This is something that we who lived in the communist era for most of our lives — we still feel very strongly about. We are very sensitive in this respect. And we feel various similarities in their way of arguing or not arguing. In their way of pushing ahead ideas regardless of rational counter-arguments.”