Posted on 10/16/2011 11:06:30 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
From the mighty polar bear to the tiny house sparrow, many of Earth's species appear to be shrinking in size, a new study reports. And the authors think it's probably due to global warming, a little like wool sweaters that shrink when washed in hot water.
But other experts say that conclusion goes too far, blaming global warming for what may be natural changes.
...
The shrinking victims, according to the study, include cotton, corn, strawberries, bay scallops, shrimp, crayfish, carp, Atlantic salmon, herring, frogs, toads, iguanas, hooded robins, red-billed gulls, California squirrels, lynx and wood rats.
Two years ago, Scottish researchers made news with the shrinking sheep study. Several studies have shown that polar bears, which rely on sea ice during the summer, also are not as big. And this latest study said the house sparrow's weight has dropped by one-seventh from 1950 to 1990. A bird called the graceful warbler showed a 26 percent weight drop during the same time period.
"There is a trend in a number of organisms across the board from plants to big vertebrates getting smaller," said study co-author Jennifer Sheridan, a biology researcher at the University of Alabama. "The theory is as things get warmer they don't need to grow as large."
Most of these animals are cold-blooded so the warmer the weather, the faster their metabolism is and the more calories they burn, Sheridan said. There's a biological law, called Bergmann's rule, that says that as it gets colder, animals get bigger. This is the unwritten flip side of it, she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Well, it’s called the “Greenhouse Effect” because humans invented greenhouses to grow smaller plants, right?
Don’t forget, all the smaller species grow near the equator - elephants, lions, tigers, apes, giraffes, anacondas.
Humans are still protein hungry, and where they do not hunt, their pets do. The shrinking animal size could be a survival trait to avoid being eaten. It could also be a response to fragmented habitat in urban and suburban areas, to permit more animals to survive in a smaller green belt. In both cases, the shrinkage is the result of human spread, not global warming.
Sadly, it still does cause the GOP establishment’s gonads to shrink (and their spines, too).
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