Tuesday - January 03, 2012

More Than Just Another Fish Story

“This is evolution in action.” [Somebody call Ann Coulter, quick.]

World-first hybrid shark found off Australia

Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.

The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

“It’s very surprising because no one’s ever seen shark hybrids before, this is not a common occurrence by any stretch of the imagination,” Morgan, from the University of Queensland, told AFP.

“This is evolution in action.”

Colin Simpfendorfer, a partner in Morgan’s research from James Cook University, said initial studies suggested the hybrid species was relatively robust, with a number of generations discovered across 57 specimens.

The find was made during cataloguing work off Australia’s east coast when Morgan said genetic testing showed certain sharks to be one species when physically they looked to be another.

The Australian black-tip is slightly smaller than its common cousin and can only live in tropical waters, but its hybrid offspring have been found 2,000 kilometres down the coast, in cooler seas.

It means the Australian black-tip could be adapting to ensure its survival as sea temperatures change because of global warming.

Let’s see ... sharks have been around for how long? Oh right. Sharks have been around for HALF A BILLION YEARS, and the ones we see today have been in their current form for about 100 million years, give or take a millenium. And in all that time the oceans must have never warmed up or cooled down even a degree, how many ice ages be damned, because now, when one bunch of dorks in dinghies finds the results of an aquatic redneck family get-together, suddenly it’s emergency evolution driven by one and only one possible reason.    

Climate change and human fishing are some of the potential triggers being investigated by the team, with further genetic mapping also planned to examine whether it was an ancient process just discovered or a more recent phenomenon.

If the hybrid was found to be stronger than its parent species—a literal survival of the fittest—Simpfendorfer said it may eventually outlast its so-called pure-bred predecessors. [Drew: wouldn’t that be a littoral survival of the fittest? Or is that too shallow a jest?]

“We don’t know whether that’s the case here, but certainly we know that they are viable, they reproduce and that there are multiple generations of hybrids now that we can see from the genetic roadmap that we’ve generated from these animals,” he said.

“Certainly it appears that they are fairly fit individuals.”

The hybrids were extraordinarily abundant, accounting for up to 20 percent of black-tip populations in some areas, but Morgan said that didn’t appear to be at the expense of their single-breed parents, adding to the mystery.

In other words, this kind of shark, long considered to be several different species, has always interbred - that would cover the “multiple generations” part and the “extraordinarily abundant” part - but Science (cue Heavenly Trumpets) just never noticed it before. But WTF, let’s not admit that, and instead blame Global Warming. And probably George Bush, by next week.

Dorks in dinghies ... chum, but with pocket protectors.

PS - Simpfendorfer??? Sounds like some kind of 4 1/2 string electric guitar for that special musician in your life. Yeah, my sense of humor is that bass.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/03/2012 at 03:52 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals • Climate-Weather • Science-Technology •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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