Extreme Heat's Effect On Wildlife
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Show with David Cooper, where we utilize nonlinear reverse inverse backward thinking protocols. It sounds like this. A heat wave hit North America in 2021, and billions of mussels were cooked alive.
What extreme effects did the 2021 heat wave have on wildlife?
Baby birds fell from overheated nests, but some species thrived. So when punishing heat happens, what decides who dies, who adapts, and who strangely wins in the animal world? That's what we're going to discuss here with marine ecology professor at the University of Victoria, Julia Baum. Julia, welcome into the program.
Thanks so much for having me, David.
So when people say heat wave, they think, ugh, sweaty. But in the animal world, heat waves can be really deadly. What are some of the negative things that can happen when we encounter a period of extreme heat?
Well, actually, really similar things to what people encounter. So the heat dome here in B.C. in 2021 actually was deadly for a lot of people. As I'm sure you know, the town of Lytton burnt to the ground. There were about 600 people that perished in that heat wave. And it was similarly stressful for animals. So everyone was feeling the heat out here. We found really widespread effects of the heat wave on animals as well as plants. Basically, any type of organism that couldn't get up and managed to escape it somehow really suffered.
Now, certain like mussels, for example, they just disappeared, decimated, if I'm not correct. What other species really suffered?
All the other things living alongside the mussels on our coastline. So any what we call marine invertebrates, so mussels, barnacles, oysters, things like that, because they live on our rocky coastline, right? So they're basically sitting on this very exposed rocks. And if you think about, you know, how much a parking lot, concrete in a parking lot heats up on a hot day, kind of similar thing. So in general, we had temperatures here, Where I am in Victoria, around 35 to 40 degrees. But on those rocky coastlines, the temperatures were getting up to about 50 degrees Celsius. And those organisms, obviously, they're attached to the rocks. They couldn't move. And so they just baked by the millions, possibly up to billions.
Yeah.
Sounds delicious. Also sounds absolutely awful.
No, it was not delicious. It was my colleague, intertidal ecologist Chris Harley at UBC was the one out there observing all of that and documenting it and taking photos and doing the estimates. And he talks really vividly about the stench of all that dying stuff. Meat, basically, you know, I think we eat mussels, but imagine it all. Imagine leaving a billion mussels out on the coastline baking and rotting in the sun. It was a pretty overwhelming smell from what I gather.
All right, sounds like an ecological disaster and not delicious.
Not delicious.
There are some species that oddly thrived, and I don't want to paint this as a silver lining. It is not, but it's certainly a scientific curiosity. Like sea lettuce, for example. What happened with various species that ended up oddly doing well in the heat?
Sure, sure.
Which species suffered the most during extreme heat events?
It is super weird, right? In the case of sea lettuce, which is really, you know, most people have probably not heard of sea lettuce.
Also sounds delicious, but probably isn't.
It's definitely not. It's kind of a, it's like a green wet mop. along our coastline here, right? It's like really spongy and absorbent. And anyone who goes for a walk along the beach on the west coast of British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest will have seen this. It's like a very bright green, spongy, wet mop type thing. But the reason that it did well is not so much that it loved being baked in the sun, but what happened is All the other members of its community, so all the other seaweeds, which are brown seaweeds and red seaweeds and kelp, which are the type of seaweed that we really like, they all, kind of the same as the mussels, they just baked. They completely bleached, dried out, baked, dyed.
And then there was open real estate. And so the sea lettuce is a type of algae that is opportunistic. It's kind of like a weed, and it can grow really fast.
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