{"id":781,"date":"2012-03-21T14:19:49","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T14:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/?p=781"},"modified":"2012-03-21T14:19:49","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T14:19:49","slug":"noisy-humans-actually-distort-the-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/03\/21\/noisy-humans-actually-distort-the-forest\/","title":{"rendered":"Noisy humans actually distort the forest!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Man-made noise disrupts the growth of plants and trees
\nhttp:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/nature\/17457323<\/a><\/p>\n

When I read the title I thought that somehow the plant and trees were being individually affected by the noise, but it seems it is ‘just’ the behavior of pollinators and seed dispersers. I recall recently learning about one of the side effects of reintroducing wolves to Yellow Stone: brook trout got larger. On the surface it is incredibly hard to make the leap to more wolves = larger fish, but this is what they discovered… The lack of predators for large grazing animals (elk, deer, etc.) meant that the shrubs and whatnot growing along the sides of creeks was kept very minimal which allowed for fish predators (such as eagles) to easily locate and capture the trout, thus forcing the population to reach sexual maturity faster (hence be smaller). The returning wolves favorite location to hunt is right along the sides of streams and creeks which lead to a dramatic reduction in the grazing there which lead to a huge resurgence of growth along the banks which made life a lot more difficult for the fish predators which allowed the trout to reach much larger sizes.<\/p>\n

Life is full of these sorts of non-linear feedback loops (negative as well as positive (though which is which is often in the eye of the beholder)). That is what gives Darwin the field to determine fitness, thus survival, thus evolution. We are no doubt in the midst of a massive extinction event on par with some of the worst recorded in geological history and without a doubt the extinction event is all man-made. Also without a doubt many people will say that this is a bad thing, but it really is just a thing and life will adapt as it has no choice in doing and while we may see dramatic reductions in diversity, there are already clearly species that are winners in this human caused extinction event. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Man-made noise disrupts the growth of plants and trees http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/nature\/17457323 When I read the title I thought that somehow the plant and trees were being individually affected by the noise, but it seems it is ‘just’ the behavior of pollinators and seed dispersers. I recall recently learning about one of the side effects of reintroducing … Continue reading “Noisy humans actually distort the forest!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions\/782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}