Looking forward to their first album dropping.
Witty!
Humpback whales are forming super-groups
111–120 of 134 posts
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years.
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> 50 years of failed climate predictions
Right. Just because some predictions weren’t accurate, doesn’t mean they were directionally inaccurate. You biodiversity and total volume of plant/animal/marine biomass that’s not human or commercially consumed by humans has depleted in the last 50 years and it only accelerates every year. There objectively will be fewer whales, if any in 50 years. Life as we know is ending and has been for decades.
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
And will give way to many which thrive or evolve to thrive in hotter climates?
In human time scales, the species which thrive will tend to be the adaptive generalists. Evolution takes time.
And: on the 'r' side of the r/K reproductive strategy. Whales are literally the exemplar of K-selection, that is a very small number of high-quality offspring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory>
Whale lifespans are long, populations and fecundity / brood sizes are small, sexual maturity relatively late, and childhood mortality relatively high. All of these make for slower rather than more rapid evolution.
Species such as krill (on which many whales feed) are far more likely to evolve rapidly in the face of increasing selection pressures. Whales might well find themselves boxed into an inescapable evolutionary corner.
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years.
Why put a number on it? Every number so far has been wrong. Can we agree on the negative impacts of humans on an environment conducive to humanity without putting obviously wrong timings on predictions? I bet your intention is to provoke urgency but to most people it just causes an eye roll because it's not true, whereas the underlying ideas are true.
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Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I have no problem blaming the rich. You are post here you are most probably part of those people who are skirting it at their leisure. Even I with a life long devotion to climate and environmental issues have a hard time to be a positive effect. The only way to not skirt your responsibilities right now is to be a Greta Thunberg. > liquified dinosaur bones I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be t…
> I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be true. When I was 13 I did believed it, so now days I try to not spread this factoid. I took it as sarcasm.
Correct.
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#116Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Algae are the bottom of the ocean food chain. Everything interacts with it. But algae's happy to grow in a bowl of water left in the sun. Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar. It's not that other things don't interac…
But it's not a bottom up interaction. If whales are killed off from climate change, then those other things can get out of control. Too much algae, and then you have hypoxic environments. A perfect example of this is when sea otters were nearly hunted to extinction which caused sea urchins to flourish which caused the death of coral and coastal environments which started to affect the larger things that depended on t…
I think we're coming at this from different directions. The OP I responded to originally said: "Warming will kill off most of the systems these animals depend on within 30 years." which isn't what you're talking about. A top-down extinction looks like whaling in the 1800s and we already had that. Now they're on the mend.
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
tl;dr is there's very poor ROI to do nothing to improve our polluting habits and banking on the world sorting itself out. Furthermore, most actions we can take to improve climate outcomes can also improve societal and technological outcomes. The only downside to taking more actions to have clean energy and less pollution are based on made up economic rules that normal people are supposed to follow, but that the super…
While I have no problem blaming the rich. You are post here you are most probably part of those people who are skirting it at their leisure. Even I with a life long devotion to climate and environmental issues have a hard time to be a positive effect. The only way to not skirt your responsibilities right now is to be a Greta Thunberg. > liquified dinosaur bones I know this is a nice factoid that does not need to be t…
The rich and powerful bit was specifically around how we could easily do more for clean energy and pollution if politicians and ultra elites stopped acting like it's economics preventing us to do so. World powers are fine to go to war on a whim, but the second we talk about health care, cleaner energy, pollution, or other topics that will broadly benefit humanity, we are met with "this is too expensive to do".
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#119I hope we create whalegemma (similar to dolphingemma) so we can explain to them how to co-exist better with humans (e.g. avoid this area during their whale hunting season, travel to this area if you get sick or tangled in rope).
DolphinGemma at this point hasn't accomplished much. If they had anything groundbreaking they probably would mention it on their page. But instead it's filled with many hopeful statements. https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/dolphingemma/
Re: Humpback whales are forming super-groups
#120holy units batman > Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air. Pick a lane BBC. But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that dr…
How we measure things in the UK has been dragged into political debates (Boris floated the idea of forcing supermarkets to list weights in pounds and ounces "again"). So critical thinking or sane decisions are out the window on this front. Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation". An organi…
It’s not cost, it’s culture. Nearly every other country, including the vast majority of the commonwealth has managed to convert to metric distance. The UK and the US look like geriatric reactionaries, who refuse to change, not because they can’t, but because they won’t.