Evil_Greven posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LFbL4-lIbs

i'm sure it's fine

Chard posted:

*unironically getting fat in anticipation of food shortages*

Xaris posted:

what happened to your old one? i thought you had some cool 1800s burner thingy

maxwellhill posted:

it's also clearly not still there, that's what the story is!

Chard posted:

*unironically getting fat in anticipation of food shortages*

kater posted:

does an unsellable Florida condo still contribute property tax?

Hubbert posted:

Talk about being underwater on your mortgage!

bedpan posted:

lmao at the guy saying "in the 70s, people said the beach would be all gone by 2000 and it is still here"

www.seattletimes.com - Mon, 18 Mar 2024 posted:

During recent marine heat waves, millions of gelatinous, pickle-like filter feeders washed up on West Coast beaches.

Little has been understood about how the population explosion of the seemingly alien creatures, called pyrosomes, affected life in the Pacific Ocean.

But a new study shows the proliferation of the animals might have sucked up precious energy from the food web, likely affecting fish and animals higher up in the food chain.

The study by Oregon State University researchers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration analyzed how a model of the ocean food web changed before and after recent marine heat waves.

The study found that the heat wave had wide-ranging effects on the movement of nutrients and energy in the Pacific Ocean, with pyrosomes absorbing much of the energy. The results are significant since the models suggest that most of the redirected energy to pyrosomes did not go on to feed other species.

In the last decade, the Northern California Current marine ecosystem, which extends from Vancouver Island in Canada to Cape Mendocino in California, has experienced a period of abnormally warm temperatures.

In 2014, a particularly intense marine heat wave brought temperatures roughly 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal and was dubbed “The Blob,” for its appearance on satellite temperature maps. According to NOAA, that heat wave continued until mid-2016, and abnormally warm temperatures have occurred in the North Pacific nearly every year since 2019.

Since then, regional research and studies have documented a decline in salmon runs, die-offs of sea birds and harmful algal blooms that closed Dungeness crab fisheries, all related to marine warming. The study from Oregon State University is one of the first to comprehensively analyze the heat wave’s effects across the entire food web from the smallest phytoplankton and detritus on the seafloor to whales, fish and seabirds, said co-author Dylan Gomes.

“What this showed us is that these heat waves impact every predator and prey in the ecosystem through direct and indirect pathways,” he said.

Researchers compared two “end to end” ecosystem models, one populated with data from 1999 to 2012 and one from after the onset of the marine heat wave in 2014 until 2022. Researchers estimated the biomass for 86 different organism groups with data from NOAA sampling and commercial and recreational fisheries, satellite information on phytoplankton and other studies.

Comparison of the two models showed which organisms received more and less energy, and found pyrosomes were by far the greatest benefactor while other species, like jellyfish, sardines, cod and certain types of sea snails and slugs, lost out.

Until the onset of the 2014 heat wave, pyrosomes had never been detected in 25 years of NOAA surveys, Gomes said. Each cylindrical pyrosome, which have been found to be up to 3 feet long, is a colony of tunicates a few millimeters long, he said. Pyrosomes are typically found farther south and are free-floating filter feeders consuming phytoplankton.

“They went from being zero — completely absent as far as anybody knows — to being one of the most abundant things in the entire ecosystem,” Gomes said.

According to the study, pyrosomes have been considered “trophic dead ends” since they have low energy content and most of them end up as detritus. It’s not clear how nutritious they are to the species who have consumed them in recent years, Gomes said, which means species further up the food chain, from the fish caught commercially to marine mammals, have likely been affected.

“That has an impact on the entire ecosystem … the pyrosome is consuming energy that normally would have gone through multiple prey to eventually end up in a salmon,” he said.

With global climate change, marine heat waves are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, but what exactly the next few years will look like for the Northern California Current is unclear, Gomes said. The study takes a “first stab” at the impacts of the heat wave by looking before and after 2014 but does not predict what the food web could look like if temperatures were to return to normal or how the food web has changed in between periods of heat since 2014, he said.

“The take-home here for people and food security is that we want to know how fishery resources are shifting so we can better manage our oceans. We don’t want to deplete our resources. We don’t want to make any ecosystems collapse,” Gomes said.

Hubbert posted:

Taima is strong and my friend, which is why I wanted to hear their perspective.

mawarannahr posted:

uhhh what the gently caress are these. bdell please destroy.

Blobby creatures washed up on West Coast beaches during marine warming, sucking up energy

mawarannahr posted:

uhhh what the gently caress are these. bdell please destroy.

Blobby creatures washed up on West Coast beaches during marine warming, sucking up energy

mawarannahr posted:

uhhh what the gently caress are these. bdell please destroy.

Blobby creatures washed up on West Coast beaches during marine warming, sucking up energy

Hit Man posted:

https://x.com/CNBC/status/1769756825233010966?s=20

mawarannahr posted:

“The take-home here for people and food security is that we want to know how fishery resources are shifting so we can better manage our oceans. We don’t want to deplete our resources. We don’t want to make any ecosystems collapse,” Gomes said.

mawarannahr posted:

uhhh what the gently caress are these. bdell please destroy.

Blobby creatures washed up on West Coast beaches during marine warming, sucking up energy

mawarannahr posted:

uhhh what the gently caress are these. bdell please destroy.

Blobby creatures washed up on West Coast beaches during marine warming, sucking up energy

Hit Man posted:

https://x.com/CNBC/status/1769756825233010966?s=20

How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil posted:

And how will we deal with unfolding climate change? There is now a widespread consensus that we need to do something to prevent many highly undesirable consequences, but what kind of action, what sort of behavioral transformation would work best? For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies.

The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter? What will actually happen? The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.

Hubbert posted:

Cold on a Cob posted:

dangit blobby

Jizzny Princess posted:

The condominium I live in has an rather insane older resident arguing that all the trees should be cut down because a bird pooped on her and another resident's car.

silicone thrills posted:

Maybe dont park your car under the birds toilet, dumbass.

mags posted:

the whole surface of the earth is the bird's toilet

Jizzny Princess posted:

The condominium I live in has an rather insane older resident arguing that all the trees should be cut down because a bird pooped on her and another resident's car.

Jizzny Princess posted:

The condominium I live in has an rather insane older resident arguing that all the trees should be cut down because a bird pooped on her and another resident's car.

silicone thrills posted:

Maybe dont park your car under the birds toilet, dumbass.

Zeta Taskforce posted:

It must be nice to have so few worries that finding bird poo poo on your car rises to a major problem. And to have that much free time that you can make a big fuss about it.