Evolution Explains What Shrinking Plankton And Technological Dependence Share In Common

Making the Internet rounds this week is a new study on climate change’s impact on animals. The long and short of it is that warmer ocean waters lead to stunted growth and skewed population dynamics of copepods, which are tiny crustaceans that make up part of the world’s plankton. Screwing with the natural growth progression of copepods would destabilize the marine world’s most important food supply, which could have catastrophic effects that ripple through the marine food chain, bringing forth the oceanocalypse.

As absurd as that sounds, it highlights a fact of biology that’s often overlooked by reporting and the general public. All biological systems, whether it’s your own hormonal pathways or the world’s oceans as a whole, are heavily affected by events cascades whereby small changes have increasingly-branching effects of progressing amplitude. The copepods in question are a particularly potent trigger for these events because they are so uniquely relied on. That’s gotten me wondering if we aren’t facing a similar dilemma with our electronic devices.

Feel free to think of it in terms of the butterfly effect, but realize the actions aren’t produced from a single, random event. Instead, these types of biological cascades are the cumulative results of numerous systems evolving to be more efficient in concert and competition with each other. Think about puberty: slight changes in your hormonal chemistry produce giant changes to your physiology, behavior and mental processes. In general, biological systems can be thought of as working in a similar fashion.

Let’s go back to our copepod friends for a minute. Warmer water (caused by climate change) makes the copepods both grow and mature faster. Unfortunately, in these conditions they mature even faster than they grow, which means they end up reproducing as runts. This temperature-size rule holds true for most cold-blooded creatures, which means warmer oceans may produce smaller animals.

But what’s the problem with smaller animals, as long as they’re making babies? Copepods are near the base of the food chain, which means they gather more or less raw nutrients to turn themselves into tasty treats that push resources up to the next link in the food chain and so forth. At face value, runty copepods offer less nutritional value than their fully-sized counterparts. Physiologically, they are likely less fit and healthy.

I love MS Paint. The basic idea is that, if part of the bottom of the food chain is lost, everything else on top collapses. That makes risks to plankton a big deal.

That aside, the real problematic thing is that altering the copepod reproductive cycle can have numerous cascade effects within the species. If copepods start pumping out babies earlier, and thus with more frequency, feedstocks for the explosion of young could be overwhelmed, ending in a starvation-induced collapse of one of the ocean’s most important populations.

The simple takeaway is that sudden changes to biological systems can (and will) have automatic ripple effects far beyond the single species or system in question. It’s true that not all changes produce immediate results, just as not all single species extinctions have led to massive ones. There’s definitely a ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ element in play, although it’s near impossible to guess what the last straw will be. What we can definitively say is that, when those changes affect the reproduction of a creature that’s the base food supply of the world’s oceans, the potential effects are massively devastating.

What’s all of this got to do with cell phones? One reason the copepod changes are so worrisome is that there really aren’t many food alternatives to them at that point in the oceanic food chain. Similarly, as we store more of our important information solely on our phones and computers, and use them more and more for basic tasks like route-planning, we are increasingly reliant on them over anything else.

Let’s take lovely Los Angeles for an example. Living in LA means driving absolutely everywhere, and it’s nigh impossible to just start navigating about without some sort of help. Also, with the metropolitan area encompassing dozens of separate cities, it’s impossible to find a phone directory that encompasses everything.

Instead, the city’s citizens and businesses deal with all of their contacts, traveling and shipping electronically. Doing so is so much more efficient that it’s reasonable to expect that one day address books and paper maps are going to be mere relics of the past. I mean, we’re pretty close already. It’s also reasonable to expect that a giant earthquake is going to rock LA sometime in the future because the whole city is sitting on a fault line.

Now imagine this scenario: all of our movement and communication is through one channel: electronics. By becoming more efficient, we’ve decreased our flexibility when it comes to some relatively small event like an earthquake-induced power outage. Food distributors won’t remember the numbers of their counterparts to organize shipping runs, which will all run awry anyway because drivers will be forced to run alternate, undamaged routes they’re unfamiliar with. People won’t be able to call their friends and family because they forgot their phone numbers, which will lead to legions of people clogging the streets because they tried to drive to their loved one’s houses and got lost.

Now, I’m sure someone will want to argue that by the time we become fully dependent on electronics, we’ll have better methods of guaranteeing their charges. That’s beside the point and, given the sorry state of our infrastructure, does anyone honestly believe that we’ll be power outage-proof in the near future?

The fact is that when we discuss artificial and/or rapid changes to specific things in the biological world, we can’t write them off as isolated. I’m sure that plenty of people who’ve heard about the ‘shrinking animals’ bit have said, “so what if they’re smaller? They aren’t dead. This research is a waste of time and money.” That type of comment misses the forest for the trees, but it’s unfortunately all too common these days. There’s no way for researchers to study the world’s ecosystems as a whole with much resolution. Instead, studies like this one are valuable pieces to the puzzle explaining just how interconnected everything in our world is.

Evolution Explains is a periodical investigation into the human-animal (humanimal?) condition through the powerful scientific lenses of ecology and evolution. Previously Evolution Explained Why We Still Have Butt Hair

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