Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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. And so it kind of saw this opportunity open real estate on the rocky coastline and just spraying up really quickly.
And suddenly, instead of having this lush, biologically diverse seaweed community, we just had this green kind of spongy mop thing kind of all over the coastline, which is not what we want. So, you know, it sounds like, oh, there were winners and losers. Well, maybe on balance, that's sort of OK. And that is absolutely not the case.
But it is curious that these species like did well as opposed to just universal doom during the heat. I know you're a marine ecologist. Maybe it didn't surprise you, but I'm kind of surprised by that.
Yeah, I mean, I think they didn't, you know, so it didn't necessarily do well during the heat wave. But in the month or two afterwards, it was able to. increase and kind of capitalize on all the carnage that had happened around it during the heat wave. And for some other species, we didn't see massive declines in some species. So typically for
Mammals, big mammals and birds, we didn't find evidence that their populations had declined. But I would say that that's more so a case of we don't actually have really good data to know what happened to them. So for mammals, the only data that we have for mammals is what we call camera trap data.
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Chapter 4: How did marine invertebrates respond to extreme heat?
And so you can't say from that, oh, they were all dying and their population declined. Really, that just indicates a change in their activity level. So they probably just declined. went into the forest and sought shade as any of us would, right? So it's a change in activity level and kind of similar for birds. Basically, one of the only sources that we had for birds were acoustic recordings.
So there were wildlife biologists who not to do with the heat dome, but just were running these long-term studies where they had recorders set up. And they record what they hear. And often what they're recording are songbirds. And they just found slight differences in the times of those songbirds. So what that tells us is that birds and mammals, they're doing something different, right?
They're trying to escape the heat. So maybe they're out foraging in the open at the cooler times of day instead of the optimal time that they would normally do it. But we don't actually know whether or not a lot of them died, for example. And that kind of gets the reason I'm making that point is that these heat waves just erupt very quickly without much warning, right?
And so scientists don't have time to, you know, plan a study and plan exactly how we're going to you know, collect the evidence for every type of species out there. We just had to, you know, make do with what we had, which was by reaching out and talking to all sorts of scientists and say, did you happen to be out observing nature during this heat wave?
And can you share data and can we work together and try to figure this out?
So the impacts may well be worse than we think. They could be way worse. On the plant side, were there areas where the plants actually absorbed more carbon from the environment during the heat wave? That seems kind of odd to me.
Yeah, so that might be a case of what we could legitimately call winners. So some of the plants, I think, on the landscape were winners in the sense that they were able to absorb more carbon. And the reason for that is because, well, the area that the heat dome affected was so massive, right? So it was over almost all of BC and into Alberta and Oregon and Washington.
And so across that huge area, there are some areas that just happen to normally be a little bit cooler and wetter, right? And so those areas, if they heat up a bit, it can actually be good for them. It's like they're performing better than they would have normally. Whereas the areas that are normally hot and dry, that pushed them past their limit.
As extreme heat waves become sort of a new normal, unfortunately, are we heading towards ecosystems that have some kind of winters like this that reshuffle in positive ways in some sense? Or are we really just like barreling towards disaster here?
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