
California’s Birds Are Testing New Survival Tactics on a Vast Scale - a_w
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/california-birds-climate-change.html
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vinceguidry
I don't think people really grasp the majestic _scale_ of evolution. All
living things are constantly evolving, all the time, in response to threats.
The Earth has seen rising temperatures before, but what it didn't have back
then was _grass_.

The dinosaurs evolved to get big because they couldn't graze. After the meteor
got rid of them, grasses started to overtake the land, providing food chains
for herbivores that simply didn't exist, and megafauna went from reptilian to
mammalian.

Mammals are more adaptable than reptiles ever were, and the other great
offshoot of reptiles, birds, are more adaptable still. The hit to biodiversity
that climate change creates may not be as large and cataclysmic as we think it
will be.

And it may be very short-lived. We can geo-engineer as a stop-gap until the
rest of the world catches up technologically. China's already starting to
successfully push back, Latin America and Africa really aren't that far
behind. The developed world already slowed its contribution to climate change
massively and is getting better all the time.

What I worry about is that we won't be able to save large cetaceans. Dolphins
seem to be doing fine, but the larger sea critters are barely hanging on. But
my thinking is that the biggest hit to their ecosystem happened 50 years ago
and it didn't kill them, so they're adapting to noisier oceans. Maybe they're
not as fragile as we think.

Ocean acidification has destroyed much of the diversity of coral reef
ecosystems, but I don't think we'll ever reach the point where jellyfish take
over the seas again. We're seeing blooms but mammals can figure out how to eat
them.

Managed climate change can have the interesting effect of making the world's
ecosystems more and not less robust.

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throwaway5752
Can you elaborate on 1) when the last time the earth saw temperatures like
what are forecasted in the next 100 years (4-6 deg. celsius increase without
large scale changes in energy consumption) 2) how much evidence exists that
grasses because widespread above the k-t boundary 3) evidence that dinosaurs
evolve to large sizes because they couldn't graze 4) evidence that there were
not herbivorous large dinosaurs 5) evidence that ocean acidification is the
cause of coral reef die-offs/bleaching 6) when jellyfish previous were an apex
organism in the ocean ("take over the seas again")?

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okmokmz
Speaking to 5)

"Warming causes coral bleaching (Figure 1C), which is the breakdown in the
symbiosis between corals and their symbiotic dinoflagellates (zooxanthellae),
which are essential for coral growth. Acidification decreases calcification
and may ultimately result in the inability of corals to form a skeleton." [1]

"Although higher pCO2 conditions do not appear to have a strong negative
impact on physiological parameters, ocean acidification will have a negative
impact on both colony and coral reef ecosystem scales. The reduction in
calcification for these coral species will lead to generally weaker skeletons,
increasing the risk of physical damage and bioerosion at the colony level" [2]

[1]
[http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...](http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060054)

[2][https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/46650429/Phy...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/46650429/Physiological_and_isotopic_responses_of_20160620-21973-1bw5zeb.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1533316555&Signature=2t4XwcmjF6eMy2YtoBV%2Bw%2BPqygk%3D&response-
content-
disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DPhysiological_and_isotopic_responses_of.pdf)

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candiodari
Fun thing about evolution. Suppose you consider every cell division a
calculation for evolution (which it is).

A good global average for cells is ~2 hours between cell divisions (because
plants, animals, ... are utterly insignificantly small parts of the biosphere,
they don't matter at all).

How many cells ? Well one can assume that every spot on earth, on average has
~2 tons per cubic meter of continuous biomass on it. In the oceans this is
very uniformly true (and more like 3-4 meters but it decays exponentially as
you go down), and on land the topsoil is much the same, but not as deep.

A back of the envelope figure for biodensity is 1.2 _10^8 cells /g. So there
would be ~2 tons of biomass per square meter of earth, making 2.4_10^14 cells
per square meter, for 510 million km2. That makes something like 10^30 cells
total for the earth, each of which computes on average once every 2h. Or
1.4e26 computations per second (and these are full "does this work ?"
simulations, not a single addition).

> A paper published in Science estimated that in 2007 the total global
> computing power was 6.4×10 __18 instructions per second.

This means that evolution tries a billion new survival strategies for every
assembly instruction any computer worldwide executes.

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andygcook
I have to be honest. I wasn’t sure if this was an ecological article or one
about scooters before clicking through. Glad it is the former.

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taneq
All living creatures are testing new survival tactics on a global scale,
always.

~~~
throwaway5752
Usually not of this magnitude and in response to weather patterns not seen in
(at least) tens of thousands of years, caused by decades of buildup of
greenhouse gasses caused by human activities.

Two examples of many:
[https://twitter.com/wunderground/status/1025383601032970241](https://twitter.com/wunderground/status/1025383601032970241),
[http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-
scrip...](http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/science/sd-me-scripps-
pier-20180802-story.html)

