World Biodiversity Day: Climate Change Also Drives Evolution
BERLIN - New scientific evidence confirms that human action, such as carbon emissions causing global warming, and industrial-scale search for food, is decimating biodiversity - and, in some cases, is driving threatened species to evolve and adapt at unexpected speed to new living conditions.
An example of this evolution accelerated by human action is the new sexual behaviour of codfish, says the Austrian biologist Ulf Dieckmann, an evolution and ecology researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), near Vienna. 
According to Dieckmann, codfish has within a couple of decades adapted to new age structure within its own species, provoked by fishery.
Until some decades ago, codfish reached sexual maturity at the age of 10, and only when it measured at least one metre. Now, codfish reaches sexual maturity at the age of six, and when it measures only 65 centimetres, Dieckmann told IPS.
“Some fish species have the capability to adapt to modern living conditions within a very short period of time,” Dieckmann said. “Given that large-scale fishery hunts especially the larger and older (codfish) exemplars, the survival of the species rests upon the younger animals,” he added.
Dieckmann has been observing codfish behaviour for several years. “Industrial fishery has decimated codfish, and one consequence of this is that there is more food for less fish in the seas,” he said. “That’s why the younger fish exemplars are growing more quickly, and reach sexual maturity in earlier years.”
“You can simply say: If a fish waits too long to procreate, it might be too late, either because the fish has been caught in a net, or because younger competitors have already taken this function over,” Dieckmann pointed out.
Dieckmann’s findings have been corroborated elsewhere. Biologist David Reznick of the University of California, observed a similar evolutionary process among guppies, a small, freshwater fish, often kept in aquariums.
Reznick observed that if the oldest guppies are retired from a population, their sexual places are occupied by younger exemplars. Since guppies grow more quickly than codfish, the process of evolution occurs within five years, while the adaptation by codfish to new age structure within the population can take as much as 40 years.
Species’ capability to adapt to new living conditions is a founding evolutionary element of life. In the absence of massive disturbances, such as a climate catastrophe, evolution takes place at a very slow pace.
However, human-made changes in climate and living conditions of species are accelerating this process of adaptation.
“No species can survive if it is not able to adapt,” biologist Matthias Glaubrecht, professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin, told IPS. “The decisive factor is the dimension and the speed of the change in the species’ habitat,” Glaubrecht, also director of research at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, added.
Glaubrecht said that it is possible that species in general always have the capacity to adapt to very quick changes in their living conditions. “But, in many cases, human action is evidently the accelerator of evolution.”
However, some species cannot adapt to drastic changes. This is the case of the black cock, which used to inhabit large regions of Central Europe, especially in marshlands. As a result of the destruction of its habitat with the industrial exploitation of peat, the species is only found in some northern German regions.
While the black cock is considered a loser in the battle of evolution in the ecological context created by human action, another bird, the white-tailed eagle, is seen as a winner.
“Until some 15 years ago, we believed that this eagle could only survive in the large, quiet forests of old, tall trees in Central Europe,” Rainer Kollmann, a biologist at the University of Kiel, some 250 kms northwest of Berlin, told IPS.
“But we had to change our hypothesis,” Kollmann said. “We have found that the white- tailed eagle has been able to adapt in a very quick manner to new habitats, in Northern Germany, in Poland, and even in Scandinavia.”
Kollmann said that the eagle has been able to adapt to habitats, which, at first glance, appear as less-than-optimal. “If the bird finds the right foodstuff in the middle of cities, then it can even choose that location as its breeding place.”
Such an unusual phenomenon has been observed in several Northern German cities, and even along freeways, Kollmann explained.
Other evolutionary changes observed are new singing patterns and earlier sexual activities among birds living in the middle of large cities, compared to similar species inhabiting forests.
But such changes are the benign part of evolution accelerated by human action.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global warming is already decimating biodiversity all over the world, with some 150 species disappearing every day.
In the report released by the body’s working group II last April, the IPCC warns, “climate change is likely to affect forest expansion and migration, and exacerbate threats to biodiversity resulting from land use/cover change and population pressure in most of Asia. Marine and coastal ecosystems in Asia are likely to be affected by sea level rise and temperature increases.”
Food insecurity and loss of livelihood are likely to be further exacerbated by the loss of cultivated land and nursery areas for fisheries by inundation and coastal erosion in low- lying areas of tropical Asia.
Similar destruction of habitats for numerous species is to be observed in biological hotspots, such as the Amazons, and in Central Africa, the report added.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service.
Nancy Pelosi has a big question. If you are interested in giving Pelosi your ideas for what Congress needs to do to address “climate change” go to Yahoo.com front page and there she is, asking for your input.
I’d like to tell Pelosi that one thing Congress can do to address GLOBAL WARMING is to stop blowing hot air and address the overpopulation, resource depletion and pollution that is causing it. Since the causes are too politically charged for politicians to address, the people will have to do it ourselves by becoming lawmakers like Gravel sez.
Dealing with global warming requires that we stop increasing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that means aimeing for something like an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use on a global scale.
I’m sure Nancy Pelosi means well, but the question that would be interesting to see answered is this:
“Speaker Pelosi, considering that Chevron is headquartered in California, how do you think they would respond to an 80% reduction of their fossil fuel transportation market, which would likely be accompanied by an 80% reduction in profits and dividends? How would Peabody Coal respond to a ban on the use of coal to generate electricity? How do you intend to oppose these entrenched interests?”
Also, the root causes of current global warming are not overpopulation, resource depletion and ‘pollution’ - it is the change in the composition of the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use (~75%) and deforestation (~25%), both of which pump excess CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere. Halting deforestation and replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and conservation are the only viable options to slowing the current rapid rate of global warming.
This will require global cooperation on an unprecedented scale, so the first thing Congress should do is to sign onto a new international carbon emissions agreement, while also agreeing to cooperate on renewable energy development (shared technology, etc.)
“global cooperation on an unprecedented scale”
Which looks nothing like congress, maybe a few, Clean House!!!
ike sez: “Also, the root causes of current global warming are not overpopulation, resource depletion and ‘pollution’ - it is the change in the composition of the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use (~75%) and deforestation (~25%), both of which pump excess CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere. Halting deforestation and replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and conservation are the only viable options to slowing the current rapid rate of global warming.”
Excess CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere is caused by excess demands for resources from too many people that are polluting the atmosphere, and from their cow farts. Bandaids like halting deforestation and renewable energy (see the corn energy controversy on recent articles here), conservation and maybe praying to the sky god are temporary measures and wishful thinking, particularly in light of a consumption dependent economy.
A clever statistician could construct a moving average fuel efficiency system. A revenue neutral system designed to make a sliding credit for higher mpg cars and penalty for low mpg cars would force innovation.
If this credit was aggressive enough high mpg or electric cars would be very low price compared to gas guzzlers.
Or we could set up a rapidly increasing carbon tax, radioactive waste tax, mercury tax etc.
Of course little will be actually done, because we have the best government money can buy.
I don’t mean to nit-pick, since i basically agree with the science as far as it goes, but this article is rather inappropriately titled. It is probably true that climate change drives evolution to some extent, however the drivers cited in this article are primarily over-fishing and habitat destruction, which are not necessarily identical with climate change. They are certainly caused by human activity, just not by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I’m not being a skeptic, just a careful reader…..
Doesn’t overpopulation and (greedy) resource depletion cause an increase in fossil fuel use (~75%) and deforestation (~25%)?
Here’s something else to consider. What about fuel rationing? I know this would never happen in reality because the oil companies would be livid. I’ve often wondered if one way to curb consumption wouldn’t be to simply allocate a certain amount of gasoline to each person, a reasonable amount based on driving a reasonable distance each year. Any fuel consumption above and beyond this limit would be heavily taxed and would require the person buying that extra fuel to pay heavily for its use. This might spur people to think a bit more about how they use their fuel and what type of vehicle that fuel goes into. Part of the problem lies in the fact that people drive high mileages in short periods of time which can only increase their carbon footprint. If gas was rationed, they’d have a hard time racking up those mileages.
Here we go with the population stuff again.
If overpopulation is such a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, why do the countries with the most stable populations like the US, and Australia and Europe, or rapidly stabilizing populations like China, have the highest and fastest growing greenhouse gas emissions?
This blaming “population” on the probelm seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how Capitalist economics work, a stubborn desire to retain profoundly wasteful lifestyle, and bit of racism. The ever increasing usage of fossil fuels is driven by the capitalist imperative of economic growth, not population growth, which even if the global populations was halved tomorrow, would still sontinue - they would simply figure out how to increase per-capita consumption among the bourgeois.
PJD:
Capitalism is based on consumption, economic growth and the ever cheaper labor that population growth provides. The more people, the more resources consumed, the more pollution and global warming, the cheaper the labor and the more economic growth.
In answer to falling wages, poor families have more children to put to work to bring home less and less. Economic growth depends on higher populations of cheap labor in your own country (China, India) or in other poor countries whose labor corporations exploit. As these countries are overexploited, resources disappear and jobs are moved to countries with cheaper labor and less pollution controls, their people immigrate. The US and other developed countries try to keep their own country’s populations stable with strict immigration laws and fences.
As the world becomes more overpopulated, conservation and energy alternatives can only take us so far. Not addressing the population hot potato issue and hoping that God will provide, is just another faith based initiative the oligarchy uses as an excuse to not address equitable resource and power distribution.
Monopolists ignore the population issue on their MSM, making us believe that economic growth is the panacea. And that population growth is not the cause of global warming from pollution, resource depletion and species extinction. That its just the lack of technological fixes to our problems.
Wildlife Park biologists know that too many of any one species can destroy the entire ecosystem. In our arrogance we believe we are exempted from destroying our global wildlife park by overpopulating it.
You failed to address my main point - population growth, in itself, is not connected with increasing greenhouse gas emissions. While stabilizing population is an important long-term goal, it has NOTHING to contribute toward the needed immedaite reductions of greehouse gas emissions - which are overwhelmingly being being produced by the global bourgeois, who, lasy I checked aren’t having many babies.
PJD
Human population is exponential. Population curves have a ceiling. If you dispute the fact of this ceiling, consider that the amazon rainforest will be gone by 2020. The human impact is already very severe. We may have overshot the ceiling already.
The “management of nature and of human life by organized society” for the sake of enforced egalitarianism would have to manage that ceiling, and that would be a very ugly and evil thing.
I would much prefer “a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology”.
Back with the causes rather than the cures, it is good to remember that evolution of other species is more likely to be NOT good for humans than it is to benefit us.
macchendra,
You still didn’t address my point.
Generally, it is thinly populated countries are responsible for most of the worlds grenhouse gas emissions. If, for the sake of arguing, population growth and not capitalist expansion is the cause of greenhouse gas emissions then, considering the short time frame for addressing gobal warming, the only solution would be some form of mass euthenasia or genocide. This should start with those who are emitting the most grenhouse gases - white affluent Americans. Of course, history teaches that in reality they would start with the poor and dark skinned.
So, it should be obvious that population control, while a important issue, must be treared totally separately from immediate action to address climate change. The fact that so many (probably rich) Americans in this forum think of it before any other more effective action can only be interpreted as refusal to take personal responsibility for their wasteful suburban/exurban lifestyles, or are motivated by not-so-subtle racism.