Environmental change, including climate change, can cause rapid phenotypic change via both ecological and evolutionary processes. Because ecological and evolutionary dynamics are intimately linked, a major challenge is to identify their relative roles. We exactly decompose change in mean body weight in a free-living population of Soay sheep into all processes that contribute to change. Ecological processes contribute most, with selection—the underpinning of adaptive evolution—explaining little of the observed phenotypic trend. Our results enable us to explain why selection is not realized even though weight is heritable and why environmental change has caused a decline in Soay sheep body size.
I'm bigger than either of my parents. Diet couldn't have any thing to do with it, no way. It must be man caused global warming. This is utter crap for science!
75 years of in-breeding creating more and more runt offspring.
Sheep dip! Snake Oil !
I wonder if any of these jeenyuses had enough sense to do a study on what foods the sheep were eating, what were available 24 years ago and in what relative abundance versus today? I doubt if the sheep subsist on just grass. Even if they do, they are many varieties of grass. Some would be better food sources than others. I think what we are looking at here is another Kaibab waiting to happen.
“Sheep lie! Sheep lie!”
Then there's no hope...soon they will be the size of rodents.
Wasn’t there research done in the past that basically shows creatures stuck on an island will grown smaller versions of themselves over time, whereas the mainland creatures will pretty much maintain normal sizing? Or am I mis-remembering?
It’s the wool. They leave them out in the rain. Everyone knows you can’t wash wool in warm water.
“But over the past quarter-century, Hirta has had unusually short and mild winters. As a result, Ozgul and colleagues propose, grass has become available for more months of the year, meaning the Soay sheep do not have to bulk up as much. In addition, Hirta’s harsh winters used to kill small ewes born to young mothers. But now these small ewes survive—and because of their low birth weight, they never get as big as normal sheep”.
Dman that global warming! It’s going to give us milder winters and longer growing seasons. Ctap! We’re all gonna die.
On Islands off of the coast of Southern California the skeletons of Mammoths have been discovered in, Identical in every respect to their larger kin they were only 4 ft tall. Must have been the SUVs driven by the Clovis Indians.
So these “scientists” never heard of Scotland’s Shetland Islands? Shetland sheep, Shetland ponies and Shetland sheepdogs...all small.
As a result, Ozgul and colleagues propose, grass has become available for more months of the year, meaning the ....... Further mathematical modeling allowed the researchers to propose that natural selection has played little--if any--role ....
In other words they haven't a clue.
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This topic is from July 4th.The Hirta sheep belong to a breed known as Soay, after the remote Scottish island where they arose. One of the most primitive forms of domestic sheep, Soays first came to Hirta in 1932. Because Hirta is a remote island, its sheep have remained genetically isolated, and no other sheep have been brought in for breeding. That's made Hirta's Soays ideal subjects for scientific study.To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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A new study, to be released as soon as I can find a journal to publish it, finds that Climate Change/AGW leads to more and more biased modeling.
My models predict that we are at a tipping point, and that if something isn't done immediately, then in the next ten years, there will be a catstrophic dearth of scientific findings whose conclussions are NOT related to Climate Change/AGW.
