OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Ecological communities on the Oregon coast are being subtly destabilized by the pressures of climate change despite giving an appearance of stress resistance, new research by Oregon State University shows.
The findings are important because assessing and understanding how plants, animals and other life forms respond to a warming planet is critical to human welfare, lead author Bruce Menge said.
The study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that ecological communities in Oregon’s rocky intertidal zone have grown less stable for at least a decade though their structure – the organisms that comprise them – has basically stayed the same.
The community destabilization arises from decreasing resilience – the ability to bounce back from disturbance. The findings suggest other ecological communities around the globe that project a look of stability actually wouldn’t appear that way upon close inspection of how their member organisms collectively react in the face of disruption.
“Climate change is threatening to destabilize ecological communities,” said Menge, a professor of integrative biology at OSU who has been conducting research on the coast for four decades. “A possibility is that they’ll stop being persistently occupied, what we call basins of attraction, and move into other states.”
Menge, postdoctoral researcher Sarah Gravem and colleagues in the College of Science looked at a total of six sites in three distinct regions of Oregon’s low intertidal zone from 2011 to 2019. The regions are Cape Perpetua on the central coast, Cape Foulweather to the north and Cape Blanco to the south.
At every site the scientists created five “disturbed plots,” each a half-meter square. Once a year those plots were cleared of all life forms big enough to be seen with the naked eye: limpets, mussels, sea anemones, barnacles, seagrass, sponges, snails, crabs, sea stars, etc.
The plots were photographed regularly and from those pictures, researchers could gauge the amount of taxa on each plot.
If the ecological communities surrounding the plots were stable, the plots would show steady recovery patterns following each clearing. That was not what happened, the researchers found.
Generally, the disturbances caused communities to move toward structures dominated by bare space and “weedier” taxa like barnacles and filamentous algae.
“And in all cases, over time the rates of recovery slowed and also became more variable,” Gravem said. “Increasing variation in key ecological processes can be a signal that an ecosystem is on the verge of a state shift. On the Oregon coast, the factors behind that increasing variation appear to be coming from changes in ocean currents and thermal disruptions like marine heat waves, which can alter growth, decrease colonization rates and kill organisms.”
The research doesn’t necessarily indicate that the iconic rocky regions of Oregon’s shoreline are nearing an ecological tipping point where sudden, often irreversible ecosystem changes happen, the scientists say. But the findings aren’t good news either, they say.
“On land, extreme wildfires illustrate how gradual changes in temperature or rainfall can eventually lead to catastrophic events,” Menge said. “In the ocean environment, novel occurrences like marine heatwaves and disease epidemics are the new and acute threats being added to the gradual increases in water temperature and ocean acidification commonly associated with climate change.”
The scientists say that although it’s difficult to predict exactly when a sudden ecosystem change will happen, systems nearing the brink of one may send out warning signals. Increasing variability of community structure is believed to be one of them, and another is the system recovering more and more slowly from small perturbations.
“Resilient systems can quickly bounce back to their original configurations after a disturbance,” Gravem said. “Rocky intertidal systems are highly dynamic but Oregon’s has begun to show signs of losing its resilience, likely in response to unprecedented stresses related to acute warming events. Even the intact communities we studied alongside the cleared plots became more variable, which we believe to be a harbinger of instability and an early warning sign for community state change.”
The National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Kingfisher Foundation and the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation supported this study.
Angela Johnson, Jonathan Robinson and Brittany Poirson of the OSU College of Science also participated in the research.
JOURNAL
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Animals
ARTICLE TITLE
Increasing Instability of a Rocky Intertidal Meta-Ecosystem
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
10-Jan-2022
Pretend to find the bogeyman of climate change EVERYWHERE! Just fudge the results, and get the next grant money JACKPOT!
They’re going to have to find a substitute for fudge since climate change will cause the extinction of the cacao plant. 🙂
Not to mention coffee…
Just 20 000 years ago there would have been no trees in what today we call Canada.
How would the ecological communities on that same spot of the Oregon coast have looked like when sea level was 120 m lower?
Failure to “blind” the taxa counting procedure makes it a total wank of of a study.
A peer-reviewed total wank of a study. Those peers are corrupt.
I wonder does peer reviewed actually mean peer approved????
Excellent choice of words. Shame I can only give you one up vote.
If they showed anything, it was that recovery rate was variable.
A few years ago, they would have blamed this on pollution. Did they take regular water samples and test for all forms of pollution to see if there was any correlation? Or is any change automatically assumed to be “climate change” these days?
Did they do any sort of research to try to determine if these sorts of change had occurred in the past?
Right on the last question. Its all “climate change”, or covid, or mean orange man, or something. They’ve cried “wolf” too many times.
It is even simpler than that.
“Generally, the disturbances caused communities to move toward structures dominated by bare space and “weedier” taxa like barnacles and filamentous algae.”
So they made some empty spaces – and the results were more bare space and the taxa that thrive in bare spaces?
How does that prove their ridiculous hypothesis about stable adjacent communities? It sounds exactly like the result that should have been expected!
I never studied the ecology of rocky coasts but I presume “stages of succession” occur there- just as they occur in a forest. If you clearcut a mature pine forest in New England- it won’t grow back to pine, it’ll usually grow back to hardwoods with a minor component of pine. As time goes by- whether you leave that forest alone or thin it or some other disturbance occurs, it’s all very well understood as stages of succession. I should think what’s happening on the coastal rocks is much the same. First you get one set of species on bare rock- then over time others will come in. Perfectly natural. The only disturbance happening on those rocks is clearing those spaces!
Joseph, its even more ridiculous than that: Every year they went back and scraped the plots back to bare rock. There was never enough time for the plots to work their way back to the normal, widespread dispersion of the ultimate varied species’ distribution.
Design a study to get what you want ideologically, get funding for it from ideologically motivated institutions and, surprise … surprise, you get ideological results, not science. Throw in a bunch of unsupported statements about climate change and ocean acidification and you have CliSciFi clickbait for the masses.
You got it.
They assumed that 12 months was enough time to respond to the original baseline.
Joseph’s analogy gets it too. What would happen in a 10 acre forest plot if they trashed it (removed all visible vegetation), every September? The next year there would be less vegetation to remove; succeeding years would be less and less. In the end they could proclaim proof that, because their plot was less subject to fire, Oregon wildfires are happening less often.
And how exactly did they determine how fast the cleared areas should have recovered to what it was before?
Good question.
What has “a half-meter square” to do with the whole coastline?
What has an artificially cleared “half-meter square” to do with the natural disturbances taking place in the whole coastline?
“Or is any change automatically assumed to be “climate change” these days?”
BINGO!
Coastlines are normally under stress it is called storms, Tsunami waves Earthquakes and more.
ST: The fact that one of there study sites is called Cape Foulweather might be a tip off.
I wonder how their observations compare to the same experiments conducted 30-40 years ago – you know before climate change? Oops, no control data to compare to thus no valid conclusion. Please repeat experiment in 30 years to see if there’s any change, I’ll wait.
… and, as everyone knows, these events usually affect only half-meter squares of coastline… (/s needed?)
There it is again…”experts” and “scientists” proclaiming the sky is falling. Immediately my BS alarm went off, as it so often does these days, when I see articles like this one. Letters behind the name no longer carry the same weight as in the past. Maybe its just me. Or something like living through all the predictions in the last 70 years. Could be.
These ‘scientists’, ‘ekspurts’ are real Klimate Krackerjacks….
” … There it is again…”experts” and “scientists” proclaiming the sky is falling … )
…. based on the results of their sand sculpture competition works!… (/s needed?)
I respectfully submit that your phrase “experts and scientists” would be better stated as “eternal child Ph.D students and teat suckers.”
Does this mean more time at the beach? Everywhere you look there are grant and pub opportunities (nuggets). Found one!
Did anyone do this 50 or 100 years ago so that a comparison can be made?
When land is disturbed, there is a predictable sequence of colonizing plants as determined by the soil and climate zone. Is there any reason that we should not expect a similar response of succession species in the intertidal zone?
Then again, they may not! Conjecture without any firm support.
Never mind a hundred years. How about 5,000 years ago during the Holocene Optimum when it was 3 degrees warmer than it is now? Oh yes, their test plot was probably under water because the seas were higher than now.
I am never surprised (any more) by researchers who have no clue about things that are fairly common knowledge among the population at large. Mind you, ignorance of those things has a huge benefit for them. It means they can publish crap that they couldn’t if they were aware of mundane facts that undermine the foundations of their carefully engineered and erected castles in the sky.
It’s far easier to make stuff up if you don’t have to accommodate reality.
anything is possible if you don’t know what you’re talking about
Rank speculation is one of the defining characteristics of CliSciFi. Others are data falsification, statistical manipulation, exaggeration, rent-seeking, denial, personal attacks & etc.
If they scraped down to bare rock then they removed nutrients that would normally be available for restoration. What they did is like when someone builds a home and starts by scraping the topsoil off, hauling it away, and building on a clay foundation. Not much grass will grow in the surrounding yard for a *loooooonnnnggggg* time.
The question then becomes “is climate change going to affect the base nutrients available in that micro-environment? They didn’t even test for it. Heck, they apparently didn’t even consider it!
I wonder if they knew about this California study on the 18.6 year oscillation? Denny, M. W. and R. T. Paine. 1998. Celestial mechanics, sea – level changes, and intertidal ecology. Biol. Bull. 194:108-115. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1543040
They noted the danger of short term studies, this one on intertidal animals subject to changes in exposure, greater during maximum inclination. Also subtle T differences, maybe got half the cycle. The Intertidal is a tough place to earn a living.
I have long wondered about the impact of the lunar cycle on earth systems, but I have seen very little research on the topic.
The entire Earth is in constant change as always. More study is needed.
and more money, much more money, is needed…
The Chinese figured this out thousands of years ago in The “I Ching”- the “Book of Changes”
Bruce Menge is married to Jane Lunchenco.
Lunchenco is the worse fabricator of fallacious science. She concocted AGW Ocean Dead Zones, Osteoporosis of the Sea (acidification), endangered fisheries that aren’t and the ClimateCentra.com propaganda machine.
She, her husband & other family members have enriched themselves making up crap and calling it science.
In out inept world of zero accountability they easily get away with and face no consequences for anything.
“Bruce Menge is married to Jane Lunchenco.”
OMG!
Great catch.
Nothing like keeping it all in the family. One can only imagine the dinner table conversations.
Research to be done, conclusions to be reached, grants to be awarded.
Every year for 8 years they killed everything in a plot and were surprised that over time the recovery to the annual slaughter was slower. Well, duh, it isn’t “climate change” it is the annual slaughter. Fools!
I am no oceanographer but is a year’s time enough to reestablish an eco system even in the best of ocean conditions? Seems like this is designed to fail.
”The findings are important…”
Of course they are, just as important as the grant money they have to justify. If there’s no doom and gloom they become redundant.
More “researchers” looking to apply an answer to a perceived problem affecting life on our planet. “Look what happens when I do this” and although I’m not really sure why I’ll get published if I assign the cause to climate change.
Somebody who is not a scientist should make up an extreme whopper of a AGW story- totally absurd- then mention it to a newspaper and see if they publish it. Tell the newspaper that it’s really big news- a major discovery and see if the paper bites.
John Cook already did that. They bit.
If climate change isn’t happening just invent it.
Remember the penguin hoard that moved away, over the horizon, when they couldn’t take any more poking from the scientists? You have to build high walls with razor wire tops and hire guards if you expect your poor tortured subjects to stay put.
Coastal ecosystem being destabilized by UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS AT OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY ASSIST IN MONITORING THE INTERTIDAL ZONE ON THE OREGON COAST.
A bunch of university students like those thumping about on the intertidal zone would be enough to destabilize any Ecological system anywhere
“At every site the scientists created five “disturbed plots,” each a half-meter square. Once a year those plots were cleared of all life forms big enough to be seen with the naked eye: limpets, mussels, sea anemones, barnacles, seagrass, sponges, snails, crabs, sea stars, etc.
Seems like a manmade predetermined outcome without any scientific value.
Least shocking headline ever. Do you expect climate scientists to admit that their entire career is a farce? Their job is hyping scare stories and begging for money, it’s what they do.
Exactly!
Clicking on Oregon coastal stations with long temperature records show no significant net change in the raw air temperatures over the past century.
Not Oregon but the tidal gauge at Neah Bay Washington shows a falling trend over eighty years.
“the tidal gauge at Neah Bay Washington shows a falling trend over eighty years.”
OMG, the ocean is running out of water.
It’s worse than we thought!
Every change is a destabilizing factor for Ecological communities.
Very likely the coast at Neah Bay is actively rising – post-glacial isostatic rebound and tectonic uplift caused by the Cascadia Subduction Zone come to mind.
“At every site the scientists created five “disturbed plots,” each a half-meter square. Once a year those plots were cleared of all life forms big enough to be seen with the naked eye”. They cleared everything away EVERY YEAR and expected no reaction??? I think the sea life is smarter than the scientists – if someone is going to clear them all away from an area every single year, then sooner or later the sea life is going to say “heck I’m not going back there!”. Naturally the scientists did not mention this possibility in their pre-determined finding. Instead, they worked on the basis that by doing something completely unconnected with climate change over a period that was of no climate significance, they could blame the inevitable negative result on climate change and their paper would breeze through pal-review and be hyped by a fawning and unspeakably ignorant media.
Fortnately, limpets are smarter than the media.
Did these charlatans really expect to see natural recovery from the completely unnatural disturbance that they perpetrated and how in Hell’s name are they qualified to make such assessments and what did they use as yardsticks? Besides, do they not realise that there has not been any discernible climate change for at least the last 20 years, as measured by UAH? So, they are deliberately destroying something completely natural and asserting that the way it recovers is unnatural. Worse. These are the new crop of “scientists” and their mentors.
“On land, extreme wildfires illustrate how gradual changes in temperature or rainfall can eventually lead to catastrophic events,” Menge said.”
No, wildfires do not illustrate climate change. That wildfires occur in almost all climates, wherever fuel is sufficient, disproves it. Wildfires do illustrate the result of biomass growth and accumulation. Bare land doesn’t burn, but as plants grow the fuels build up, and the likelihood of fire increases. The more fuel, the greater chance it will burn, and ever more intensely.
Menge doesn’t study forests and evidently knows nothing about them. It is common, however, for a self-proclaimed “expert” in one field to self-proclaim expertise in all fields.
Good grief, what sort of self important power trip are these folks on?
OK,
But these folks have now shown up and, to my reading, are claiming the ability to read the minds of not only barnacles and similar species, but the minds of (just ‘get’ the hubris). the minds of “weedier species’
(They really do wanna start watching their backs, maybe the ‘weedier species’ are reading *their* minds)
what are the words. what are these people on. which planet. etc etc
<wanders off muttering in the hope of coming across an understanding female bovine>
PS There are NO other sorts, they are ALL lovely *and* empathic
“Doolittle talked to animals (I certainly did an awful lot to my cows, they are incredibly good listeners – *do* try it sometime)”
I did that once (talked to cows) while in college in the late ’60s while- er… uh… under the influence- and they talked back.
And they were doing this in 1870 in order to get a good comparison? Ah yes, of course they werent, so they have too many variables, and one they claim is responsible, hasnt been tested for.
This is bunkum.
Twaddle!
I presume they have a comparative ecologically ‘stable’ site which they have subjected to the same conditions and which has reacted as they say these should?
Well of course not, the sites…………… ‘should have done this’ is just in their imagination, They dreamed it up. Might as well as said they should have produced enough food to feed the whole of Oregon!
They seem quite happy to humiliate themselves. The grants must be impressive.
” At every site the scientists created five “disturbed plots,” each a half-meter square … ”
What a realy nice, and representative, experimental setup!… (/s needed?)
This is equivalent to study the structure of a fortress by building a sandcastle in the beach and watch what happens…
I was furious about my Alma Mater (MSc Economic Geology) Oregon State University for poorly contrived pseudo research, and was going to comment, but I see the WATTS Regulars have beaten them about the head and shoulders sufficiently, so never mind.
Didn’t Marcott, of scientific fraud fame, come from OSU? Oh, and his PhD advisor that collaborated on the scientific misconduct in the subsequent paper?
Yes, there is an OSU connection.
See the following: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
Bill, Roger Pielke, Jr.’s writeup is is of minimal concern compared to the scientific fraud revealed by Steve McIntyre and in Rud Istvan’s “Blowing Smoke.” For example, of the total of 73 total proxy records identically used in both Marcott’s thesis and the subsequent NSF-funded Science study, Steve reviewed the 31 alkenone series he had previously audited. Of those 31 proxy series, 3 records were “pulled back” in time to get rid of their downward trends post 1900. Additionally, 4 records were “pulled forward” in time to place their up-ticking endpoints in the post 1900 window.
Rud showed that of the 73 proxies, a total of 9 were “pulled back” and 10 “pulled forward.” In one example, the data range was moved by over 1,000 years. In another, the range was moved over 500 years.
This issue alone is “smoking gun” evidence of scientific fraud on the part of Marcott and his OSU thesis advisor and subsequent study co-author. Nothing was done, however, by OSU, NSA Federal funding agency nor the publisher, Science..
Dave Fair
Thank you for the additional information. So, 20-25% of the proxies were altered in a systematic manner. That would create a false (fraudulent) trend in many data sets.
B Rocks
I am doing a learned study on the emergence of parasitic ecosystems around gravy trains.
https://joannenova.com.au/2022/01/stop-that-now-climate-change-helps-aggressive-mangrove-forests-build-bigger-tropical-islands/
Climate change has unleashed rampant growth in mangrove forests. The trees are capturing coral detritus in large sand drifts, and locking it into whole new ecosystems that expand 5 to 6 meters a year. It’s just remarkable — some islands have grown by several kilometers since 1928.
Dramatic, islands are growing…..
This reads like a high school science project. Field plot research design is extremely challenging in a multi variate and highly non homogeneous system. As described, their experimental design appears weak at best, and there is no mention of their predetermined statistical design used to test their hypothesis, which is never clearly stated, only inferred. Nothing was said of environmental measurements.I can’t imagine one can learn much from a handful of short-term “plots” about the size of my feet. Apparently, the bar is set very low for dissertation research these days at Oregon State, but the student and her professor didn’t hesitate to wax philosophic as they grossly extrapolated their vague findings to planetary-scale predictions. Just more climate porn.
Amazing that this obscure and sloppy bit of research even sees the light of day beyond her doctoral committee.
By someone who took 8 years to graduate.
Things are changing – always have and always will, research shows.
Pure, unadulterated, pseudoscientific garbage. They have these “experimental forrests”, the most famous being Hubbard Brook, where they do these sorts of “experiments”. They even created “ice storms” between 2015 and 2017, to see how damaging they are, the “understanding” being that due to “climate change”, we will be seeing more damaging ice storms more often. One weeps for what science has become.
Don’t forget the beach parties.
I live in Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast. I follow the water temperature here closely as it affects fishing, crabbing, clamming. The thing is, that temperature is 54 degrees year round, it never varies. Since I am on the beach and checking rocks for mussels (pretty tasty, with a red wine sauce) a lot I have noticed absolutely no change. And when I was in Mexico living on my sailboat in the Sea of Cortez, the water temp went from 69 to 85 degrees in a single year. That didn’t have much of any effect either.
And remember the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska? The coastline has all come back with the exception of areas where they pressure washed the rocks.
I think I am too practical to believe all these theories that never seem to come true.
As an Oregonian I am embarrassed by this. OSU is a joke. It’s a factory churning out the newest models of “woke” “liberals” and they have done little during the covid debacle save more of the same “science” you see here.
I’m glad to see so many folks here easily shooting down this garbage.
Sadly most Oregonians, even the right-wing will likely gobble this up and never doubt it for a second. Then for the rest of time, this total farce of a “study” becomes “fact” and then those of us who dissent from its erroneous findings will be labeled with an epithet to denounce our viewpoints.
It’s incredibly telling that they announce other “climate change” effects on land regarding wildfires, as if the forest 200 miles inland and the intertidal zone have the exact same ecological “rules” as each other. Thus meaning “climate change” always effects both, no matter what.
You can spot the liars by merely asking a hard question. When the response is not information but rather anger, you’ve got a liar on your hands.
Ask OSU what variables they controlled for. The answer will be not the information you request but rather vitriol, slander, accusations, straw man attacks, obfuscations, and blatant lies.
This “science” is not questionable, it’s Gospel, and so it’s just an opinion. These people want there to be climate effects on the coast, so that’s what they “found.”
Please write to these people and explain how poorly they did this study. Please.
“subtly destabilized by the pressures of climate change despite giving an appearance of stress resistance”
Meaning we can’t see that there is a change and we can’t prove there is but we know it is there.
We cannot find proof of stress but we know it must be there, so it is there, just hidden. Sneaky bugger that Gaia
According to data there has been no increase in temps in the continental usa over the long term, so whatever stuff they choose to make up about the rest of the world with poor temperature records, there does not appear to be an issue in the US of A?
Oregon State University says ecosystems destabilized by climate change.
Who says ‘ecosystems’ should be stable ?
Sounds like more trash if you ask me . .
This article reminds me of just how much I miss actual science!
For those who missed it below, Menge is Jane Lubchenco’s husband.
That’s highly germane. Among other things.
BULLOCKS!!! The simple explanation is that whatever steps they did to obliterate visible life int he plots each year was having a cumulative negative impact on the ability of life to return. How can they be so obtuse?