Ain't never had me a sea turtle.
Posted on 01/08/2018 12:38:15 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I see this particular thought form just now ripped through the ether.
:D
LOL
Always a silver lining.
A really great time to be a boy turtle!
LOL
Always a silver lining.
So your saying McConnel got a chance
Delete my previous posting. I thought about it.
Or maybe to install air conditioning on a few nests.
;D
Only if the girl turtles lower their standards...
Ain't never had me a sea turtle.
Oh, my gosh! You mean even turtles need males to reproduce ? Wow. Let’s tell McConnell.
I like turtles.
I wanna be a boy turtle.
In the world of male sea turtles, this is better than a winning Powerball ticket.
Another case of can’t make this stuff up? /s
No kidding! My guess is the males of the species all have a shit eating grin on their face.
Climate change did the same thing to the males in Hollywood, CA.
The academic snowflakes have replaced the scientific method with government grants.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-papers-are-probably-wrong/
From little ol me.
99% females
So each male gets 99 females to work with. This means a burst in the next few years of sea turtles.
The only dude in the bar on ladies night.
;)
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