“Why Did The Biggest Whales Get So Big?” (Atlantic) is popular science at its most fun. Is this profound or obvious? Argument for obvious: If you want to cross an ocean you need a bigger ship than for crossing a pond, so of course ocean-crossing animals are bigger than pond-crossing animals. Argument for profound: Arctic terns are small and yet they migrate across continents.
[The writer quotes a biologist (not a planetary physicist, but that’s okay because any American who didn’t major in Gender Studies or Folklore is now a climate prophet!) who seems confident that the Earth’s oceans will be completely different in 100 years and won’t support big whales. Is it time to invest in a whale museum? Or will there still be some cold nutrient-rich waters closer to the poles?]
@philg: Are you claiming that the quote
“… and it leads to an interesting speculation about the future… So what will happen to the baleen whales if there is less food available? Will they adapt fast enough? It took millions of years for them to reach large size. Can they shrink in 100 years?”
means the speaker
“seems confident that the Earth’s oceans will be completely different in 100 years and won’t support big whales.”
or is there another quote I missed?
If this is quote, how does a statement which is clearly prefaced as speculation about the possible impacts of (apparently well documented) trends in ocean pH and oxygenation become a “confident” prediction?
Throw your pet goldfish into a lake and it will grow into a carp (if it isn’t eaten first).
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/18/3-pound-goldfish-found-howd-it-get-so-big/
The study of genetics seems like driving using only your rear-view mirror. It’s always looking backwards for reasons as to how randomly flipping a few bits in a gigabit DNA sequence produced improbably lucky results. Yet the bigger question of why just a few bits of DNA can produce such useful outcomes remains unanswered by genetics.
While genetics and the theory of evolution through inhereted random mutations gets all the press, 40 years ago epi-genetics discovered that DNA mutations are not all random or inhereted. Some DNA changes within the lifetime of the host in response to environmental stimuli. Put different hosts in the same environment, and their DNA will usefully adapt by changing the same few bits (out of billions of possibilities). At the cellular level the environment is affected by hormones, which are affected by the host’s feelings, which are affected by the host’s thoughts. Ergo, what a host thinks is guiding its evolution. Did whales evolve big bodies because they were all thinking “hey I’d like to swim farther”?
I am confident if sufficient number of members of already selected smart dog breeds such as Labradors or Newfoundlands were left alone on not inhabitant island and by chance they went through successful mutation that expands their natural lifespan they would have a chance of creating new civilization that will not know threat of self-annihilation or ideological violence.
How dare you say Gender Studies Majors cannot believe in global warming!
> So Big
This is typical cisgender normative microaggression. The cetacean sisters reject your fat-shaming.
Because there are sufficient calories to support Very Large Creatures, and they are hard to prey upon?
>I am confident if sufficient number of members of already selected smart dog breeds such as Labradors or Newfoundlands were left alone on not inhabitant island and by chance they went through successful mutation that expands their natural lifespan they would have a chance of creating new civilization that will not know threat of self-annihilation or ideological violence.
Is this a joke?
Since the whales have been around millions of years, through several climate cycles, I’ll take the odds they will survive another 100 years.
I am NOT saying the climate is stable, just that the whales are resilient enough.
Credentials: mechanical engineer, 79 years of personal observation, never Trumper, several grandchildren exposed to the future.
Cavalier 25: Yeah. Unqualified observation about processes that supposedly taking eons always amuse me as pointless. Sorry no smileys on this blog, just text.