Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
There's a chance we'll see increased competition among higher level organisms leading to the depletion of the same low level organisms in adjacent areas until those higher levels have a die off event too allowing them to recover.
In the inter tidal zone walking around it was a solid field of mussels before the heat wave. Maybe 10 underfoot, so say 20 per square foot or 180 per square meter.so 1,000,000,000 mussels would occupy 5,000,000 sq meters of intertidal coast. If the intertidal zone is 5m wide that is 1,000,000 meters of coast, or 1000km.
If all of the mussels and oysters died in 1000km of coastline I’d say it is a significant event.
Edit: a million mussels in the area the size of a tennis court? I was thinking of the clams I was walking on in June … definitely weren’t at that density
It means that climate change is affecting the food supply
Course they probably weren’t living that close to one another.
As for the percent of the total mussel population the article didn’t say.
"1 million mussels died in an area the size of a tennis court."
I think they usually measure small things in terms of mass. Here is a report just for Pugent Sound that suggests annualized reproduction of about 850,000 kg.
>1 million mussels died in an area the size of a tennis court.
So, it could be as small as 1000 tennis courts or less then 6.5 acres.
Most likely it was spread over a larger area and this was a spot with a lot of life that got hit hard, but it is a frame of reference
If we give a rough estimate of 5 lbs. per animal (probably a lot less than that) that's around 60 billion animals killed last year so we can eat them.
It's estimated we can add another 40% to that as unwanted by-catch. So now we have 84 billion sea creatures killed each year on purpose.
If you're concerned about the environment you might consider not adding to this number.
https://www.yourfishguide.com/how-many-fish-do-we-eat-a-year...
https://oceana.org/sites/default/files/Bycatch_Report_FINAL....
Facts seem valuable when making individual decisions that affect the planet, especially when we wring our hands and wonder when someone else will do something to solve our environmental problems.
Some of the answers are right there in front of you every day.
No vegan even commented, I find vegan-bashing so much worse than vegan-evangelism. I'm seriously getting vegan fatigue fatigue.
It's a bit strange how often people will aggressively make either point 1 or 2, and then concede that the other is also true, but then decry the 3rd, which follows from 1 and 2, to be ridiculous pessimism.
Companies provide what people demand. If our demands change, then they will change. It's the only way.
To me the big difference is that seafood affects a natural ecosystem and species vs. farmed land animals.
However, they feed farmed fish wild fish apparently. Takes 5 lbs. of wild fish to grow 1 lb. of farmed fish.
Hmmm... doesn't sound sustainable.
https://www.livescience.com/5682-milestone-50-percent-fish-f...
The adult flies also have no mouth parts, and do not hang around people or spread diseases as a result.
Overall the article says it takes 20 million tons of wild fish to feed 51.7 million tons of farmed fish. Which is still a significant amount.
It doesn’t have to reproduce right away, that’s just unrealistic. But the larger amounts of free space will mean a land grab by the survivors. That’s how it works in nature.
If the climate changes and the water heats up then the ecosystem will be replaced by those animals that would survive in warmer water. That’s science.
(Meanwhile poor humans are trying to grow crops and raise animals. We may get very hungry, for decades)
You could look to the intertidal regions near the equator for more reasonable comparison. They are much less rich in life compared to the waters around Vancouver.
The point others and I are making is that life does not expand arbitrarily, or in a weaker form, the life that may expand will be a much less desirable environment for us humans than the present.
Even though you deny it, we can very simply create environments, right here on earth, where life as we know it will not be possible. Look into an operating steel smelter for example, just to remove any subtlety and ambiguity.
Sure, maybe ‘Science’ can replace all of our biosphere with extremophiles, but I for one do not desire to live in such a world. I like trees and birds and mammals and lizards and (you get the point).
It's july 18. It both is hot season and was an abnormal heat wave.
So the questions are valid.
My greatest fear -- I've seen individual animals loose the will to live. What if a biotope loses the will? What if life decides not to come back?
Currently it’s one of vast abundance, but this transformation would very likely reduce that abundance and its diversity due to a foundation of the food chain disappearing regularly.
It’s nice to think something would just replace these species, but they’ve already reduced dramatically over the last 100 years and nothing has begun to shoehorn its way into the system.
It seems the worse this gets, the less overall abundance and diversity this coastline can support.
There are creatures around the world that thrive in warmer waters. The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic science.
• Science is a way of finding out about the world, not a list of facts.
• No, actually. Rather, these creatures will die and we might lose entire species, significantly reducing biodiversity.
> The space will be reclaimed by other creatures that can survive in that environment. To think otherwise goes against basic science.
On an evolutionary timescale, something will fill the niche (if the environment remains constant enough for long enough… not looking likely, if you extrapolate from today), but science most certainly hasn't found that this happens with animals over the course of decades.
And you know what they say about basic biology…
We are seeing some warmer climate sharks moving further north, but that isn’t helpful to the foundation of our food chain. We do have invasive species of mollusks which have set up camp here permanently, but they seem to suffer and decrease in number just as the native species do. There are invasive crabs, but again, they aren’t about to patch the holes in this system.
Also, it’s important to note that our winter temperatures still hit 6 or 7 degrees Celsius. There are no warm climate creatures I know of who can move in during a hot summer and stick around for winter. That means our previously stable, temperate environment doesn’t appear to be able to be likely to host many creatures in any migratory range I know of.
I’m not a marine biologist, perhaps you know better. This ocean is a passion of mine though, these matters take up a lot of my energy and mental real estate. I want to believe it will thrive very much, but signs really aren’t positive lately.
Apart from this die out, there are a multitude of other dire situations as well. We’ve extirpated several species, caused numerous salmon population extinctions and collapses, the near extinction of a resident killer whale pod, caused the collapse of multiple species of rockfish - the list goes on.
The thing we're concerned about is that humans are apex predators and depend on a functioning food chain to survive. Filter feeders eat algae. Unconstrained algal growth is toxic to fish (salmon) that we eat. Oyster and mussel farms were devastated and some won't see a rebound for at least 3 years if we don't have another event like this. Bears eat salmon, and when they can't find it, they seek other food sources like humans.
This story is a single datum. We've got freak cold snaps on the east coast and Texas. Flooding in Europe. The world is rapidly becoming more hostile to human life.
But yeah, a hot, acidic ocean will still support life -- maybe nothing we can eat for a few hundred generations, but life goes on with or without us. Hotter climes will spread tropical bugs and diseases; life goes on.
But we're still looking for intelligent life that's survived the "hold my beer" great filter. Haven't found such extraterrestrials; jury's still out on terrestrials.
In the past the environment has changed very rapidly at time. All life eventually dies. That which endures longer is that which adapts.
A warmer more carbon rich atmosphere has some benefits:
Expanded arable regions, fewer droughts, more rainfall, more carbon for plants to grown (try turning all your carbon in the atmosphere into rock and let me know how life fares then.)
Carbon based life needs CO2. They have done experiments where a forest is subjected to increased CO2 ppm by plumbing and nozzels. It grew faster and more robustly. Life also needs warmth. During the Eocene epoch some 50 milion years ago the Arctic was sub-tropical and teaming with life.
And I don't think the article is implying that the oceans will be barren forever, but that things are changing rapidly, unpredictably, and to an extreme degree that we have no precedent for.
As others have mentioned it is unclear if a billion creatures is significant or not. But regardless this isn’t going to be a seasonal event.
The reason that we refer to this phenomenon as climate change now and not global warming is that average temperature doesn't accurately capture the ways that the climate will change as it warms. We will also experience more outlier events, more heat waves and bizarre cold snaps. This is an excellent example of the former; the shift of the Arctic air off of the polar regions south produces other anomalies. But the term "climate change" is intended to capture the increased frequencies of all these kinds of anomalous events, not just the steady increase in average temperature.