Eighty years ago, a museum curator aboard a fishing trawler in the Indian Ocean got a shock felt around the world. In a net full of mundane fish, he found one he’d never expected to see. It was a coelecanth. Why hadn’t he expected to see it? Because ichthyologists (fish scientists) believed it had gone extinct 65 million years before.
Yet there it was, flopping around, all too alive to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. The discovery shook the world of marine biologists.
Fast forward 80 years, and biologists get another shock, only this time it’s administered not by a fish but by 1.5 million seabirds.
Adelie penguins, to be precise.
Biologists hadn’t thought Adelie penguins were extinct. They knew there were millions of them in various places in Antarctica. But they’d thought they knew where all of them were.
Until March of this year. That’s when a group of researchers stumbled on some shocking satellite images—images of poop stains.
Images of poop stains weren’t unusual. The researchers had been using them to locate colonies of Adelie penguins for years. What was shocking was that these images were of poop stains where specialists in Adelie penguins had never before known that there were any. And they weren’t of poop stains from just a handful of birds. They were of stains from 1.5 million of them.
The discovery rightly delights all who love the charming-looking birds, and it should delight all who recognize them as God’s creatures displaying His glory. It certainly delighted me when I read about it back in March.
But coming upon a recap of the story just now, another thought occurred to me: If scientists could be unaware of a colony of a million-and-a-half rather large (18–28 inches tall, 8–13 lbs.) birds whose black-and-white tuxedo-like plumage makes them stand out boldly against the white background of their natural habitat, might they not also be unaware of many colonies of much smaller, less conspicuous species of plants and animals they think are extinct or in danger of becoming so?
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not implying by this that we shouldn’t be concerned about endangered species—although empirical evidence indicates that model-based and anecdotal estimates of the rate of species extinction are vastly exaggerated. What I am implying is that a little scientific humility is in order.
Featured image “Happy Penguin” by Anita Ritenour, Flickr Creative Commons.
louis wachsmuth says
“Climate change was behind 15 weather disasters in 2017” By Sarah Kaplan and Angela Fritz December 10 2018. A drought scorched the Great Plains, causing wildfires and $2.5 billion in agriculture losses. Catastrophic floods submerged more than a third of Bangladesh. Record-shattering heat waves killed scores of people in Europe and China. These were among 15 extreme weather events in 2017 that were made more likely by human-caused climate change, according to in-depth studies published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. At least one episode — a devastating marine heat wave off the coast of Australia that cooked ecosystems and damaged fisheries — would have been “virtually impossible” without human influence, scientists said…The findings, presented Monday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, underscore the degree to which climate change is already harming human society, researchers said… The Bulletin has published an “Explaining Extremes” report, which seeks to determine which weather events can be attributed to climate change, every year since 2011. This is the second consecutive year that scientists have identified an event that could not have happened without human-induced warming. This year’s report features 17 peer-reviewed analyses of 16 disasters by 120 researchers looking at weather across six continents and two oceans. Each study uses historical records and model simulations to determine how much climate change may have influenced a particular event.
louis wachsmuth says
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Dwindling Sea Ice Brings Polar Bears In Conflict With Humans By Kristen Pope | August 3, 2018 Discover Magazine… “Polar bears in Greenland, and everywhere else, are typically found out on the sea ice,” says Steven Amstrup, chief scientist for Polar Bears International, who notes the animals typically hunt seals on the ice…. “What we’re seeing recently is that bears are having to spend more time on land because of the decrease in the availability of sea ice.” Experts say declining sea ice may be pushing these bears into new locations. …. “Because as global warming melts more and more sea ice, polar bears are going to be spending more time on land, and when they’re on land they’re going to be exploring places where they think they could find food.” …With declining sea ice, human-polar bear conflicts are occurring more often. In July, a Canadian man was killed by a polar bear near Hudson Bay, Canada. Another polar bear was killed by cruise ship employees after it moved to attack them on a small island near Svalbard, Norway. ….Summit Station sits at 10,530 feet in elevation — high on the Greenland Ice Sheet and hundreds of miles from the coast. So it’s far from the polar bears’ usual habitat. This was the first bear seen at the station since it was built in 1989. …according to National Science Foundation officials.
(Goodness, we all hope the field researchers Cornwall has up there are safe)
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louis wachsmuth says
Say, did any of you folks catch the 60 Minutes show last night about the serious damage plastics are doing to the oceans and our food chain? So, tell me again, 1) the world is not over-populated with humans.2) the earth is too strong and big to be affected by human activity.3) We need more and cheaper fossil fuels so we can create more plastics 4) the bible is wrong about those verses saying the sin of mankind is polluting the earth; birds and fish disappear. Hosea 4:1-3
Webster says
None of your comments have anything to do with the subject of the post.
Bruce Atchison says
This news should make the fans of Happy Feet happy.