Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
scientificamerican.com
Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
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Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#2It’s so, so startlingly bad I will ignore it.
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#3It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#4Do you know how many sea creatures we eat every day?
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#5It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
A forest fire kills the adults but retains the young (seeds). This just killed everything. There’s no comparison.
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#6It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
How fast do these creatures reproduce? Are they going to generate billions in between now and the next hot season? How many more will die this hot season? Will even more die next hot season?
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#7It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
How comforting to know things will regenerate after we die off from our own stupidity.
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#8We need some frame of reference. How many creatures typically die every year? Without that the numbers are meaningless
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#9It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
It’s not that simple. As the article mentions, if weather continues to warm and these events become more common, we could end up with seasonal die outs of intertidal species. It’s not immediately evident from that statement, but that would completely transform the biodiversity of the coastline.
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.
Re: Pacific Northwest Heat Wave Killed More Than One Billion Sea Creatures
#10It’s obviously horrible, but it also means that it will allow other creatures to grow to fill that space. It’s like a forest fire. Sure the devastation is bad but there’s also renewal afterwards. It’s not like it will remain barren forever.
How fast do these creatures reproduce? Are they going to generate billions in between now and the next hot season? How many more will die this hot season? Will even more die next hot season?
It’s not “hot season”. It was a historically abnormal heat wave. I lived in Vancouver. You don’t normally see temperatures like that.
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.