With all the furor over coronavirus there isn't a lot of other interesting news floating around on the web. The following headline did catch my eye, "Climate change is making nightingales' wings shorter and their annual migration harder, study finds .” I read on.
It seems a group of researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid have been studying the size of birds. They discovered that over the past two decades the wingspan of nightingales in central Spain have decreased. Natural selection caused by rising average temperatures in the region as the likely cause of the trend. They hypothesized this would make it more difficult for them to complete their annual migration to sub-Sahara Africa,
My question is: “If the short winged birds didn't survive the migration wouldn’t that tend to remove the short wings trait from the gene pool?>>
It is interesting to note the article mentions that under similar climate change situations in theUS, birds actually grew in size and had longer wingspans. Then too, Audubon Society research stated that two-thirds of North American birds species are at risk of extinction frpm climate change. Another study claims nearly three billion birds have disappeared from the North American continent in the past 50 years.
A few years ago it was reported in USA Today that cats kill up to 3.7 billion birds on the continental US every year. That’s a lot more bird deaths than are attributed to climate change. I wonder how you tell the difference in the cause of death — cats or weather. Is it possible that blaming cats for killing birds is not as politically corrected as blaming climate change?
Another report that entrigued me was, “Ancient Mayans caused their own 'climate change,' shocking study says.” The study suggests that ancient Mayans may have inadvertently caused their own demise by radically altering the climate. The research looks at newly found evidence in Belize that shows the Mayans responded to increases in population and environmental pressures by creating canals and wetlands. They also had regular "burn events" while farming their lands, which may have caused a rise in carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Before recorded history, the largest increase in methane around the globe is thought to have occurred between 2,000 and 1,000 years ago, coinciding with the increase in the Maya wetlands, as well as those seen in South America and China.
The newly discovered evidence, based on aerial scans, is thought to have occurred between 1,800 and 1,000 years ago. I read this as meaning the evidence upon which the report was based was gleaned from aerial photographs with "no actual boots on the ground.”
Both articles referred to above were interesting, informative, ad well written. Future research on these topics might someday result in valuable information.
I do not mean, in any way, to impugn the integrity or expertise of any of these researchers, but I am concerned the language of the reports seems speculative in nature rather than scientific. For example, the articles are rife with such ambiguous terms as: may have changed, may have caused, suggests that, likely caused, and many other. This is a plea for more science in so-called scientific reports and less ambiguity.
Having said all that, the most intriguing mystery still remains – “Who pays for this kind of research?”
What say ye?
Links to the above reports:
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/29/
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/01/europe/nightingales-wingspan-climate-change-scn-scli-intl
https://www.foxnews.com/science/ancient-mayans-caused-own-climate-change
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