Super-predator humans reshape our prey

[GliderGuider]

This makes perfect sense, but I'd never considered it before:

As super-predators, humans reshape their prey at super-natural speeds

(PhysOrg.com) -- Fishing and hunting are having broad, swift impacts on the body size and reproductive abilities of fish and other commercially harvested species, potentially jeopardizing the ability of entire populations to recover, according to the results of a new study that will appear in the January 12, 2009, online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Human predation is accelerating the rate of observable trait changes by 300 percent above the pace observed within natural systems, and 50 percent faster than in systems subject to other human influences, including pollution, according to Chris Darimont, the lead author of the paper entitled "Human Predators Outpace Other Agents of Trait Change in the Wild."

Not only fast, the changes are also dramatic in magnitude: Harvested populations are on average 20 percent smaller in body size than previous generations, and their age of first reproduction is on average 25 percent earlier, according to Darimont, a postdoctoral researcher in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Harvested organisms are the fastest-changing organisms of their kind in the wild, likely because we take such high proportions of a population and target the largest," said Darimont. "It's an ideal recipe for rapid trait change."

[xchrom]

1. sounds like we are miniaturizing species. nt

[jpak]

2. Evolution - only a "theory" - pshaw and harumph!!11

:evilgrin:

[unpossibles]

5. right. Although in my experience the deniers are able to completely ignore all data

which upsets their cosmic apple cart, so to speak. This will be added to the mountain of evidence which they'll ignore/deny.

[GliderGuider]

3. "Honey, I shrunk the biosphere..." nt

[John Q. Citizen]

4. It was karma.

[The2ndWheel]

6. Whatever evolution is, it's the only thing that will keep us from acquiring total control

Whatever evolution is, that's the unintended consequence in all our solutions.

[depakid]

8. "the unintended consequence in all our solutions."

Like developing a taste and recipes for these:



Hell, the chinese like 'em.

[Bigmack]

7. I've been wondering....

about this idea. That is, whether humans are rapidly changing fish and animal populations.

In Puget Sound, fewer and fewer coho salmon are being taken... hatchery or wild.
It seems that they start into the Straits of Juan de Fuca still eating, but by the time they get to Seattle and southward, they have nothing in their intestines at all.

That is a break from the past. Usually, salmon eat while they are in salt water.

Seattle's Eliot Bay has something similar. The chinook salmon headed for the Duwamish River mill around in the Bay, but few take bait.

Is the pattern of fishing - that is, catching fish who eat in Puget Sound and allowing the non-eating fish to reproduce - changing the species?

[tom_paine]

9. It does indeed make perfect scientific sense, as it does with microbial evolution

induced by humans, which is manifesting itself as "antibiotic resistance", among other things.

I would not suggest that antibiotics have never been invented nor used, and you can bash me as humano-centric here if you wish, but they have healed so many and relieved such suffering that the contribution to our species' welfare outweigh all but the most severe consequences. Which may yet come, in which case I will be proven to have been wrong.

But the fact is that, like the physics theory, I can't remember which, that says the very act of measuring something alters that which is being measured (is it Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or one of Planck's Theories, I can't remember?), we do alter the species we predate, evolutionarily.

In fact, predation by other species is one of the primary engines that drives evolution, as the theory goes.

Just another in the millions upon millions of facets that comprise the Earth's biosphere, and another in the millions upon millions of facets that comprise the coming climatological and ecological shift, which is now probably 99%+ certain to come, whether it comes fast or slower, with a few plateauing cool snaps in between drastic rises, as we seem to be undergoing right now.