Climate change is turning 99 percent of these baby sea turtles female

Washington Post ^ | January 8, 2018 | By Ben Guarino

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Green sea turtles do not develop into males or females due to sex chromosomes, like humans and most other mammals do. Instead, the temperature outside a turtle egg influences the sex of the growing embryo. And this unusual biological quirk, scientists say, endangers their future in a warmer world.

Already, some sea turtle populations are so skewed by heat that the young reptiles are almost entirely female, according to a new report in the journal Current Biology.

“This is one of the most important conservation papers of the decade,” said biologist David Owens, a professor emeritus at the College of Charleston who was not a part of this research. It will not be long, perhaps within a few decades to a century, until “there will not be enough males in sea turtle populations,” he warned.

The sex of a green sea turtle is a result of its environment. “They have temperature-dependent sex determination,” said Camryn Allen, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration endocrinology researcher and co-author of the new study. “It’s not genetics. It’s actually the temperature.”

At what biologists call the pivot temperature, turtles hatch as a mixture of males and females. For green sea turtles, this temperature is 29.3 degrees Celsius (85 Fahrenheit). A few degrees below 29.3 C, all the sea turtles are born male. Heat up the eggs and only females are born.

“That transitional range, from 100 percent males to 100 percent females, spans a very narrow band of only a couple of degrees,” said NOAA marine biologist and study co-author Michael Jensen.

[Republican Wildcat]

That’s what I was thinking when I saw that line - doesn’t the author know that the science he mentions is now outdated and science has moved on from recognizing the reality of biology and chromosomes, etc. and such things are now considered bigotry?

[libertylover]

the young reptiles are almost entirely female,

But no concern of what would happen if almost the entire human population decides to be homosexual?

[Thibodeaux]

the concept of climate change and leftism is in effect sterilizing American women. their urge to be men has rendered them in effect sterile

[beef]

Good news for little boy turtles!

[EdnaMode]

Good grief.

[ConservaTeen]

They will next tell us that cholia will be in Bangladesh because of Global Warming...

[Vinnie]

Sounds like a winner.

[Wuli]

“Intelligent design” - Maybe some Green Sea turtles will start to alter where they have been laying their eggs, also from cues given by the temperature. Making land fall for egg laying so many miles north or south of where they last laid their eggs, driven BY the change in temperature. No???

[DakotaGator]

Enquiring minds want to know ;-)

[oldtech]

A hundred years ago,I doubt that there was any thought about this. Of course,a hundred years ago,there was likely no federal funds available to study it either.

[lrdg]

If that were true wouldn’t they have died out millennia ago?
Why didn’t the heat wave that allowed grapes to be grown in Norway in the middle ages kill them out? Or the Younger Dryas, 10,000 years ago? Something doesn’t sound right.