Welcome Shifting Baselines!

We have a new scienceblog here, Shifting Baselines, authored by Jennifer Jaquet and associated with Randy Olson’s Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. She has already opened up shop with an absolutely horrible, conflicting argument:
Should We Continue to Eat Seafood?

“But it tastes so good,” I whimper.

Al Gore slaps me to the floor and kicks me in the ribs a few times. “But it’s bad for overfished oceans!”

I don’t know what to do. I’d have fish or some nice marine invertebrate every night for dinner, but I have a different constraint: my wife and daughter are not fans. About the only time I have seafood is on those rare occasions I go out for dinner without the family, and since I’m not giving them up, I guess I’m effectively adopting Jennifer’s position and, if not giving it up absolutely, at least cutting back consumption greatly.

Edward Wilson is doomed

Wilson wrote a nice book, The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), in which he argued that Christians should be leaders in good stewardship of the earth. Now some religious leaders have spoken out against such activities.

The Catholic church is babbling about an antichrist.

An arch-conservative cardinal chosen by the Pope to deliver this year’s Lenten meditations to the Vatican hierarchy has caused consternation by giving warning of an Antichrist who is “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist”.

After all, as we all know, when Christ returns he will be an isolationist industrialist who will rip through our natural resources to build up an awesome war machine. It says so in the Bible.

It’s not just the Catholics—Jerry Falwell is all worked up about Al Gore and global warming.

Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, who has worked for decades to involve conservative Christians in politics, said Sunday the debate over global warming is a tool of Satan being used to distract churches from their primary focus of preaching the gospel.

Good ol’ Jerry, at least you can trust him to back up his assertions with evidence. Irrefutable evidence:

Falwell cited two Bible verses that he said apply to the global-warming debate: Psalm 24:1-2, which declares “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” and Genesis 8:22, which says there will be seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter for “as long as the earth remains.”

Uh, what?

That’s pretty much meaningless. Minnesota has seasons; Israel has seasons; I think, though, that most people would agree that there are substantial differences between the two. Even during the ice ages there were seasons. Global warming will not end seasonal differences in temperature and precipitation.

This is a problem. Trying to argue idiots who believe in magic, all-powerful words in one book into following a path of enlightened self-interest is difficult — it would probably be easier to first destroy the source of the foolishness, that book and the church organization.

EO Wilson’s wonderful book for other people

I have mixed feelings about EO Wilson’s book, The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s wonderfully well written, it’s on a subject I care about and that Wilson is clearly passionate about, and it’s trying to straighten out religious people on an important matter, but it’s also written directly to an audience of which I am not a part. I found myself alienated by the style, and despite my appreciation of his effort, simply wasn’t able to finish the book. I’m going to have to try and wade through those last few chapters sometime, though, when I’m feeling charitable enough to be able to cope with being addressed as a Baptist minister.

Still, though, I agree that Wilson deserves to be awarded a Green Book Award for The Creation—we can’t afford to wait for all the Baptists to commit apostasy before we draft them to support biodiversity. Let’s hope he wins many more, and especially let’s hope more religious organizations start acknowledging his ideas!

Life of a squid

The heathen at IIDB are talking about squid—it’s infectious, I tell you, and the godless seem especially susceptible—and in particular about this interesting paper on squid fisheries. Squid are on the rise, and are impressively numerous.

We can get an idea of the abundance of squid in the world’s ocean by considering the consumption of cephalopods (mainly squid) from just one cephalopod predator the sperm whale. Sperm whales alone are estimated to consume in excess of 100 million tonnes of cephalopods a year. This is equivalent to the total world fishery catch and probably exceeds half the total biomass of mankind on the earth (Clarke 1983). It is therefore highly likely that the standing biomass of squids within the world’s oceans probably exceeds the total weight of humankind on the earth. Given such importance squid have generally not been given the attention they deserve or have not been incorporated to the degree they need to in ecosystem models. Future research needs to rectify this.

Squid are creatures of speed: they grow fast and die young. Teleosts and cephalopods follow rather different life strategies.

The form of growth of squid is also unique and interesting. Squid just keep growing. They do not show the distinctive flattening in their growth curve shown by their fish competitors. Many species growth can be modeled with exponential or linear curves. The interesting thing is they continue growing even during their maturation phase until they die or are eaten. They seem to achieve this because of a number of unique qualities, (1) they have a protein based metabolism with efficient digestion so food is converted to growth rather than stored, (2) they are efficient feeders, using their suckered arms and beak they can remove only the highly digestible parts of prey and ‘spit out the bones’ and (3) they can grow by continually increasing the number of their muscle fibres (hyperplasia) a feature not shared by their fish counterparts. While juvenile fish recruit new muscle fibres by hyperplasia they reach a point where growth only occurs by increasing the size of existing muscle fibres (hypertrophy). This probably contributes to their flattening growth curve. Alternatively, squid show both hyperplasia and hypertrophy throughout their life span, thus they continue to recruit new fibres as well as increase the size of existing fibres (Figure 1). Such a strategy might account for their continuous growth. All of the above features contribute to the unique form of growth and the ability of squid to grow fast and fill available niches. Their life is very much life-in-the-fast-lane. They are the ‘weeds’ of the sea.

Live fast, die young…and leave a really decrepit corpse, it seems. Here’s a description of a species that really knows how to have a good time.

Much of my Southern Ocean research has focused on the warty squid Moroteuthis ingens. Up until recent years this species was poorly understood and delegated to obscurity due to lack of biological information. However, this species is regularly caught in both fishing and research trawls and my research has focused on New Zealand, The Falkland Islands and more recently Australia’s sub-Antarctic island regions. The biological understanding of this species is now perhaps the best of any sub-Antarctic squid. It is a large squid growing to over 500mm in mantle length and females achieve a much larger size than males. While M. ingens is epipelagic during its juvenile stage it undergoes an ontogentic descent to take up a demersal existence (Jackson 1993). This species has a biologically unusual and interesting reproductive strategy referred to as terminal spawning (Jackson & Mladenov 1994). Although it is a muscular squid, females (and to a lesser extent males) undergo a dramatic change associated with reproduction. Females produce a huge ovary that can reach the size of a rugby ball and weigh as much as a kilogram. In fact the ovary can weigh more than the total body weight of the male. In association with the development of the ovary the female undergoes a dramatic tissue breakdown in its body wall. This process results in a total loss of muscle fibres that transforms the muscular female into something more analogous to a jellyfish and death is associated with spawning. Moroteuthis ingens and other onychoteuthids are important prey for a number of vertebrate predators (at least four mammals, 17 birds, 13 fish, Jackson et al 1998). It is suspected that this tissue breakdown may result in dead individuals floating to the surface where they are accessible to mammals and birds.

Cool stuff…read the whole paper!

Watch out, Canada!

What could be worse than sharing a long border with hundreds of millions of ignorant, gun-crazed Americans? How about sharing a border with hundreds of millions of ignorant, gun-crazed, hungry Americans? Here’s an evocative map for you.

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That’s how the primary wheat-growing region in North America will shift if global warming continues. Farming is one of those hot-button red state issues (it’s perfect: show family farms to reflect traditional values, while supporting the reality, which is the corporate megafarm), yet what we have here is red state denialism working to help destroy one of their props.

Our judiciary at work

Justice Scalia: “I told you I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to deal with global warming.”

He’s quite right, actually: he’s not a scientist, nor should we expect him to be. That’s why our government ought to be served by competent scientific advisors…and why it’s a shame that Scalia will probably think he’s doing his job if he listens to people from hack tanks like CEI and the Heritage Foundation.

What’s up, NSTA?

This is a troubling development, and perhaps some members of the National Science Teachers Association in the readership here know something about it. They seem to be in the pocket of the oil industry.

In tomorrow’s Washington Post, global warming activist Laurie David writes about her effort to donate 50,000 free DVD copies of An Inconvenient Truth (which she co-produced) to the National Science Teachers Association. The Association refused to accept the DVDs:

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film; and they saw “little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs. …

[T]here was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.”

As it turns out, those supporters already include “special interests,” including Exxon-Mobil, Shell Oil, and the American Petroleum Institute, which have given millions in funding to the NSTA.

This is not merely an attempt to avoid entanglement in a “controversial” (not that global warming is actually controversial among scientists), since the article mentions that the NSTA has distributed PR for the oil companies. I like the NSTA and I read their newsletter…but this sounds like they’ve been bought and paid for by Exxon-Mobil, and it casts an unfortunate shadow on their reputation. Can we please have a science advocacy group we can trust?

I like the way Sara Robinson’s mind works.

Memo to the Christian Coalition: The NSTA is for sale. For a mere million bucks a year, I’ll bet you could get them on board with Intelligent Design, too.

Memo to parents: It might be time to find out if your kids’ science teachers are members of this group, and have a word with them about it. If you — or the teachers — want to complain directly to the NSTA, the complaint form is here. They need to hear from everyone who still thinks that scientific truth shouldn’t be auctioned off to the highest donor.

Australian Lungfish update

I just received word from Per Ahlberg that the status of the Australian lungfish conservation efforts have reached a critical phase: letters are needed NOW. Here’s the situation:

The Traveston Dam proposal has moved into a new and critically important phase: it has been referred to the Federal Environment Minister (Mr Ian Campbell) for consideration under the Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Ian Campbell has the power to stop the dam, but if he doesn’t it is unlikely that any other organisation or individual will be able to do so.

The first hurdle that must be crossed in order to stop the dam is to ensure that the Minister does not allow the Queensland Government to conduct the EPBC assessment of it’s own proposal – something that he is entitled to do. This would be a recipy for disaster as they would be certain to conclude that their own proposal is environmentally sound! The assessment must be carried out by the Federal Environment Ministry to ensure a proper process.

The Save the Mary River Campaign is asking supporters to write to Mr Campbell and a number of relevant senators to demand a proper assessment, and provides some very helpful information and instructions. This is URGENT: letters have to be received before 27 November.

You can get details here—start writing!

How can you eat a genius?

Maybe with a little butter and garlic.

This article makes a troubling point: if cephalopods are so smart, shouldn’t we feel some guilt about eating them?

I think I actually agree with some of the ethical issues raised, and probably should hesitate to kill and eat something like the octopus. However, it also commits the sin of lumping an extraordinarily diverse clade like the Cephalopoda into one poorly characterized gemisch. Yes, the Pacific octopus is a very clever beastie, but those schools of small, fast-breeding squid that get netted and chopped up for calamari? Not so much. The article makes a mistake comparable to highlighting the brilliance of Homo sapiens, and then arguing that we shouldn’t eat cows for fear of losing the next Shakespeare. If you want to make an ethical argument against the consumption of squid, that’s fair…but don’t do it by falsely concatenating all cephalopod species into an inaccurate classification of ‘smart, tool-using problem solvers’. It just isn’t true.

I also find this weird:

This evidence has so convinced officials on the Animal Procedures Committee (APC), the experimentation watchdog in the UK, that it has recommended to ministers that the law governing animal testing be amended so all cephalopods are given the same protection as animals.

So what have cephalopods been considered until now, mushrooms?