Man continuously wants to see himself as separate from the rest of the world of natural forces, something that he alone can control, not the reverse. Perhaps it’s as simple as being unable to truly comprehend the very long time over which nature takes to work its magic i.e. truly appreciating the fact that the universe itself is some 13 and ½ billion years old. In over the two and a half million years that we’ve been around (geologic and evolutionary time are very slow moving forces) a lot can happen to alter the original model. Yet, there may be instances when change can be brought about more quickly, which seems to be going on in our own time, with regard to climate change. Witness the dramatic changes due to climate that have begun to alarm
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The cod, an otherwise tough midsized omnivore predator, will, when it first becomes “aware “of threats to its survival from overfishing, begin to make adjustments in a number of ways, as do all living creatures, the most apparent of which in the cod is to come to sexual maturity at an increasingly early age, when it is a much smaller animal. In its attempt to avoid pending extinction, the northern cod has seen its sexual age of maturity halved in the last 40 years or so from a normal 6 or 7 years to a present age of just 3 or perhaps 4, as well as also a much lower reproductive rate. When forced to start reproducing themselves at this younger age, the egg laying potential of the young animal drops off markedly from about 9 million eggs (as was the case just 40 years ago), in normal large, fat, old, female cod…usually five and six footers in length…..the rule here being, the older the animal, the more fecund she is), to today’s perhaps 1/100th or even 1/1000th that number of eggs. Other, less dramatic changes in the northern cod’s behaviour might involve migration to a new ecosystem entirely, one with a different water temperature or even migration to a new water depth. Evolution works to maximize the number of descendants an animal leaves behind. Recent
The cod, an otherwise tough midsized omnivore predator, will, when it first becomes “aware “of threats to its survival from overfishing, begin to make adjustments in a number of ways, as do all living creatures, the most apparent of which in the cod is to come to sexual maturity at an increasingly early age, when it is a much smaller animal. In its attempt to avoid pending extinction, the northern cod has seen its sexual age of maturity halved in the last 40 years or so from a normal 6 or 7 years to a present age of just 3 or perhaps 4, as well as also a much lower reproductive rate. When forced to start reproducing themselves at this younger age, the egg laying potential of the young animal drops off markedly from about 9 million eggs (as was the case just 40 years ago), in normal large, fat, old, female cod…usually five and six footers in length…..the rule here being, the older the animal, the more fecund she is), to today’s perhaps 1/100th or even 1/1000th that number of eggs. Other, less dramatic changes in the northern cod’s behaviour might involve migration to a new ecosystem entirely, one with a different water temperature or even migration to a new water depth. Evolution works to maximize the number of descendants an animal leaves behind. Recent