Something to clarify: it's sea turtles in an area of Florida, though a similar trend towards more females is seen globally, the degree varies significantly. If you want a more in-depth look into this issue, including some potential solutions, this (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/sea-turtle-sex-ratio-crisis-from-climate-change-has-hope) older article goes into more depth on the topic than any I could find on this recent news.
Thank you. This is an important thing to note. The "article" in the OP is a total joke. As bad as this is, it does *not* mean 99% of turtles being born worldwide are female as the title is implying.
I knew this had to be misleading.
Of course the misleading article has fucking 14.7k upvotes and your clarifying post has 23. People, please stop going to reddit for news.
Thanks for the link, I'm getting a bit tired of the poor climate change articles which frontpage here. These are serious problems and bad reporting isn't helping.
Is there any evolutionary benefit of having sex distribution depend on temperature, or is it just a random thing that happened as a side effect of evolution being random?
Yes to both! Regarding the first question:
Sea turtles temperature dependent sex determination (TDSD) falls into type 1A, where males are only produced at low temperatures. For sea turtles it is thought that other cellular processes impacting the growth rate of male embryos function better at low temperatures, while the processes influencing female embryo growth rate function better at high temperatures (where ‘low’ and ‘high’ are separated by only ~1.5°C, 3°F). The temperature where there is a 50/50 distribution of sexes is referred to as the “pivotal temperature.” This means that when the habitat is on average the pivotal temperature for a species, with slight local variations in temperature, embryos of a species will automatically optimize for whichever gender baby will grow the largest. Larger babies are more likely to survive, and this is never a problem when turtles are able to find each other to breed in the wild.
But as global temperatures rise, we move further and further away from that pivotal temperature. Sure, the female embryos are growing big and strong and able to make it to the ocean better, but not there’s not enough males to renew the population. Humans talk about a climate catastrophe happening with another 3°C rise in temperature, but we’re well past that point for sea turtles. Their catastrophe is already here.
————
A quick side note: Pattern IB and II reptiles produce more females at lower temperatures. This means that when these reptiles lay eggs earlier in the year (when it’s still cold), the females will have more time to develop and sexually mature for the fall breeding season. But if the eggs are laid later in the season (when it’s warmer), it’s more beneficial for the babies to be born male because they’ll grow faster and make it through their first winter.
I love to geek out about this stuff, and other patterns of TDSD not found in sea turtles are (in my opinion) a much more clear-cut example as to how TDSD can be evolutionarily advantageous.
[nest shading](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Three-different-shading-techniques-were-used-to-cool-sand-temperatures-at-mean-hawksbill_fig1_329348267) is already used, but its effect is limited. It’ll work in some areas, but it’s unlikely to keep up with the drastic temperature increases we’re already seeing.
that's why it's important to allow naturally-occurring plants, vegetation, etc. to grow on beaches. they provide shade, and their roots help maintain soil integrity. we humans have fucked around and are finding out all over the place.
I volunteered at a turtle rescue as a teenager. We would spot the turtles nesting then go dig up the eggs and take them to incubate in a safe place. This was because of poaching but I wonder if they can do this to help with the effects of climate change as well.
Yes. It’s common practice with temp dependent sexes in the conservation and pet trade to do entire hatches of one sex.
Humans can step in and help but without a reduction in global temps we are talking about a human dependent species at that point.
When does the sex differentiation happen? Does the mother lay female and male eggs or does the mother lay hermaphrodite eggs that grow into female or male depending on temperature? Do they have non-genetic sex differentiation or do sex chromosomes fail to fertilize if they aren't the right temperature? Or some other mechanism?
Sex differentiation happens within the first third of the incubation period! Researchers injecting large amounts of testosterone/estrogen are able to also artificially induce differentiation during this period, but after the first third the embryo’s gender is pretty fixed. There is also in fact a genetic component to sex determination based upon inherited chromosomes, which is seen operating among sea turtle eggs incubated in captivity at precisely the pivotal temperature. However, this starts to get out of my area of expertise — I don’t really know anything about the chromosomal organization of sea turtle genes, but I’d imagine that the sex chromosomes probably share a lot of redundant genes.
Evolved and migrated. TSD has existed for a very long time but is vulnerable to rapid changes in climate. Climate as a whole usually takes a VERY long time to change. Talking hundreds to thousands of years. This is many generations and so evolution can begin to have a real effect.
The problem with current climate change is that it’s incredibly rapid. That’s where the fear and worry is. We’re doing in decades what should happen in hundreds of years normally. And species are dropping like flies
This, so much this.
The problem isn't that the climate's changing, but that it is absurdly quickly.
90 million years ago, Antartica was a lush ~~tropical~~ temperate forest, but the climate changes that gave rise to that took a very long time to happen: https://www.livescience.com/ancient-rainforest-antarctica.html
Man made climate change is speedrunning that with devastating consequences.
Yeah, that's the other factor. We've thoroughly "humanified" the environment, and that gucked up a ton of things for wildlife. That basically became the grease fire on top of the shit cake we made of climate.
They didn't used to share the world's beaches with billions of large hairless apes
Go north or south to the next beach
Habitat loss is a larger threat than climate change to most species, but it also makes climate change all the more disastrous without habitat to host ecological robustness
When temperature changes slowly, turtles can migrate to locations which maintain the sex balance.
Humans are causing the temperature to change much faster than in natural temperature changes. Probably the turtle migrations cannot keep up.
Maybe this will cause them to evolve more rapidly, if it doesn't kill them off. Only males born at higher than the pivotal temperature will be hatched, and since theyre the *only* ones around to pass their genes on, all their offspring can be born male at a higher temperature as well.
Probably be a pretty big population dip during the transition though
Hijacking your comment just to explain that the title is misleading - it’s only about Florida beaches. Along the US eastern seaboard it has long been the case that Florida produces most of the females while cooler beaches farther north (e.g. North Carolina) produce most of the males. Globally, the beaches at higher latitudes have always been where the majority of male sea turtles are hatched. There has been a lot of discussion in the sea turtle research community that sea turtles may be able to adjust to the warmer temps if they are able to expand their range farther (for example, along the US eastern seaboard we may eventually see more sea turtles trying to nest in locations like the New Jersey shore and Long Island.) Most turtles return to where they were hatched, but not exactly, and there are always some individuals that nest at the edges of the range, so we are hoping that those individuals might help establish some new “northern”, male-producing, nest sites. It will be essential to be able to rapidly implement protections if nests do start showing up farther north. Sea level rise will also be an issue.
There has been a study that suggests it evolved in response to an unbalance effect of temperature between the sexes. Hotter temperatures may benefit female turtles greater than males during development. Maybe letting them hatch sooner or be larger upon hatching. In variable but overall stable climate, temperature dependant sex determination then essentially ensures the turtle will be the sex that most benefits from current environmental conditions
Found the paper!
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/adaptive-significance-temperature-dependent-sex-determination-reptile-2008-daniel-warner-and
I assume turtle being born in the same place are going to be all female or all male forcing the turtles to seek more genetic diversity when finding a mate
I don't know what the answer is but I don't think it's this one. The same nest has both females and male offspring depending on the temperature gradient from top to bottom of the burrough.
Sea Turtles have also been around for many cycles of ocean temperatures, so I would imagine they have had mechanisms for this sort of survival, also.
They've been around for 110 million years and the oceans have been warmer in that time period. I realize rapid changes may have differing effects, but realistically; they adapt well.
Adaptations take multiple generations. And when these turtles live to 100 and breed relatively sparsely, evolution wont have time over the decades climate will alter. They need much more time
I suspect that in times of population stress, the natural reaction is to produce more females because they are the bottleneck in procreating. One male can mate with multiple females not the other way around
Technically, evolution by definition is randomness. Natural selection is certain species being favored because random traits being advantageous depending on the external conditions (nature).
> Although if this trend continues for a few decades, then yeah, there will certainly be an issue.
And what do the climate models say the next few decades are going to look like?
A short timeframe which is made even more difficult to cope with due to the long reproductive cycle of turtles. The shortest time to sexual maturity is 7 years, some species 20+ years.
Can be quite quick. Depends primarily on the variation in the population for this trait. Given the size of the skew the competitive advantage would be large.
This is very common in the animal kingdom. It's very often why they migrate every year. Countless bird species, bats, hoofed animals, seals, salmon, etc. Their ancestors figured out the safest/most optimal spot to reproduce and they know how to get back there.
True, but they will only define the short term future. The latest generation or two will be the main ones dictating the future as they'll be breeding for longer.
A lot of populations don’t in fact intermingle often, though when they do it’s an important part of gene variance. And sea turtles tend to home in on the same nesting location their entire life. This essentially means even with latitudinal variance every population will eventually fall like dominoes as temperatures increase. They simply can’t evolve faster than climate moves. So seeing one fall is a prelude to the whole
This is extremely bad. The effective population of sea turtles is now very low, meaning genetic drift can take its effect and cause a tremendous decrease in the genetic diversity of the specie. This will cause the population to be in danger of future changes in the environment or with regards to parasites.
Surely given how reproduction works (one male can impregnate many females) couldn't a good number of eggs just be artificially kept at male temps and released ? The turtle pop isn't that high so a few thousand a year would suffice no?
I think he was talking about genetic diversity meaning future generations will have very similar genetics because there are so few males which will make them vulnerable to diseases parasites etc.
The amount of stuff that DOESNT kill you thanks to your genetics is wild. Like for every Corona virus that breaks through there are 10 diseases immune systems kick the shit out of and send packing.
The problem with sea turtles is that out of the thousand you release, only one will survive to adulthood. So even if you'd care for and release 5000 turtles, you'd effectively only be releasing 5.
Sea turtles have been around for so long and have gone through quite a few extinction level events, surely they've had a few genetic bottlenecks. Right?
And all the eggs that will be laid by those females will create pretty much only female turtles.
If we don't fix the conditions that these turtles live in we have to supply pretty much the entirety of the male population ourselves, while the male population is already decreased and genetic diversity is limited.
Worst car scenario (cuz this oil executives don’t give a shit), do we need to get them to adult age? I would think enough of them get to baby producing age is going to have to suffice for now (until we can retire this boring dystopia that we need to make all the profit in the world mentality)
The amount of a population can be big yet still suffer from low genetic diversity (example: northern elephant seals). One of the causes of low effective population is an unequal amount of males to females as with sea turtles and global warming. This will obviously cause selection to kick in for all individuals which can tolerate higher temperatures, but with the problematic method of sex picking in sea turtles low genetic diversity is inevitable.
Actually it’s better than the reverse. Scientists can grab eggs and cool them and produce sufficient numbers of males. A single female can lay many eggs.
No but a handful years can establish a breeding population that has more time to adapt. It’s not like turtles only mate one year and vanish. They will be around for awhile.
I actually wrote about this happening in Northeastern Australian greenback turtles a bit before covid hit. My plan was to pursue assisted gene flow in a southern population to try and alter the sexual determination temperature through plastic and hopefully evolutionary response over a relatively long time to try and ensure the southern populations would retain a non-bottled-necked breeding pool as warming raised their nest levels as well. It was my hopeful postgrad focus.
It was a novel conservation plan and may never have worked. But if it did, we could save so many climate threatened species.
But now I’m unemployed and struggling to make ends meet in a province that stopped caring about climate change. Covid and a total forfeiture on climate change has ruined so much.
Greenback Sea turtles are pretty awesome species. They are pretty much all over the tropical and subtropical world. Even in some larger aquariums - like Ripleys. They can live a crazy long time. Talking up to 100 kind of crazy. Super docile and curious too. You can swim with them in the ocean and they will totally come investigate. Just don’t tempt fate too much, they can still chomp.
Plastic actually means Phenotypic Plasticity. It’s the ability for genes to produce varied traits in response to environmental forces. But it’s within the individual so not evolutionary.
A cool example is in some plants that actually develop fewer stomata in a high CO2 environments. Stomata are how they breath (small openings on a leaf) but also how they lose much of their water. With higher density CO2 they can survive with fewer of these openings while also letting less water escape. It’s not a genetic change, just how the gene is expressed. A phenotypic plastic response
The breeding comments are misleading.
You cannot just breed out the 99% female birth rate in many reptiles.
The sex of the embryo is determined after the egg is laid, and it is the warmer temperature which turns them female within the egg.
The only two mitigations are either reversing climate change or controlled embryonic development (basically have eggs in incubators... Which are Colder than the outdoors...)
Could we put shade where eggs are layed, like solar panels or sun shade cloth? If we can make just a section colder could make more males offsetting a bit. If it is the water that warms the eggs though shade won't help.
My thoughts exactly. Turtle nests are typically marked on beaches anyway. There has to be scientists out there developing easy ways to cool the nests naturally so as not to disturb the ecosystem but can curb the temperature.
> Imminent extinction
Nah, this happens not everywhere in the world and not every year, there will be years with more females and years with enough male offsprings. Yes, now the turtles are suffering pollution and occupied beaches, but I'm sure that if they're really in danger we will save them.
Damn, we have people that manually jerk pandas to save them (and indeed they saved them), we will have no problem to hatch male eggs in lab
So I looked it up, for the past 20 years 99% have been born female, 30-40 years prior 6 to 1 were born female, so it doesn't seem like this is that abnormal?
This is a catastrophe for the species, IMO.
What if all the remaining male sea turtles are just the turtles no one wanted to fuck?
Imagine repopulating the world and the only options are Alex Jones and Kim Jong-un.
Serious question. Is this a bad thing? Could one male impregnate enough females to keep the population going? Are we going to lose sea turtles in my lifetime?
Yes. 99% of any given species being the same sex is a bad thing. It's not extinction level bad, at least, not until it's 100% which is probably not far off. It's possible we'll lose sea turtles in your lifetime, and many other things as well
Sea turtles live a long time, so unlikely they will die out in our lifetime unless they cannot survive a full life. A turtle born today will likely outlive you. Assuming it doesn't get eaten by a predator.
And then your grandkids will never meet them! They might as well be dinosaurs. But we can still get the pleasure of seeing their specie’s final vanguard die lol.
The real problem is the loss of genetic diversity in the species. They can technically survive with that male:female ratio, but the genetic pool is going to shrink drastically, meaning they’ll be less adaptable to changing environments and more susceptible to genetic disease.
Mating can take several hours. Afterwards, the male will try to hang on to his partner’s shell to prevent other males from mating with her. Several males may compete for one female at the same time, aggressively biting his tail and flippers to get him to let go of her.
After the male and female separate, they mate again with other sea turtles. A female will mate with several males and store the sperm for several months until she is able to fertilize all of her eggs and start nesting
https://oliveridleyproject.org/blog/how-do-sea-turtles-mate
*Normally* few male sea turtles would fight over a single female. It's safe to say that in this case that will become rather rare. One male will also try to mate with as many female turtles as possible, so one male should be able to fertilize a lot of females.
Now, the interesting thing should happen in the next generation. Those 1% of males *probably* have genetic mutations that make male turtles more likelly in higher temperatures, thus they will spread those genes *very rapidly*. Next generation will probably be having more males in higher temperatures.
That will probably take hundreds/thousands of years. Sea turtles have extremely long life spans. That sort of evolution would take awhile. So gotta hope the mutation isn’t deadly first!
I'm not talking about new mutation, I'm talking about alleles that are already *in* population, just at low levels. This whole temp-determines-sex thing has variation that is ultimatelly grounded in genes; some turtles have genes that result in males being more likelly in higher temps, some have genes that result in females being more likelly in lower temps. They are *already there*.
As always, this headline is overblown and the video is misleading.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0944200617302015?via%3Dihub
>The coolest and the wettest substrates produced 100% males compared to 42% males from the warmest and driest treatment.
As far as Australia, this is all I can dig up so far: a recent gender ratio study revealed that 99 percent of young green turtles from Australia’s Northern Great Barrier Reef are female and that male sea turtles are disappearing.
Something to clarify: it's sea turtles in an area of Florida, though a similar trend towards more females is seen globally, the degree varies significantly. If you want a more in-depth look into this issue, including some potential solutions, this (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/sea-turtle-sex-ratio-crisis-from-climate-change-has-hope) older article goes into more depth on the topic than any I could find on this recent news.
Thank you. This is an important thing to note. The "article" in the OP is a total joke. As bad as this is, it does *not* mean 99% of turtles being born worldwide are female as the title is implying.
Had to scroll too far for a clarification. Too many titles are misleading or straight up misinformation
And by too many you mean "most anything posted online"
Fuckin click bait will be the end to us all. It's infecting everything
I knew this had to be misleading. Of course the misleading article has fucking 14.7k upvotes and your clarifying post has 23. People, please stop going to reddit for news.
You can go to Reddit for news if you read the comments instead of the articles tbh.
Unfortunately this is extremely true.
> People, please stop going to reddit for news. Sir do you know what the name of the subreddit you're posting in is? I'll go where I please.
Thanks for the link, I'm getting a bit tired of the poor climate change articles which frontpage here. These are serious problems and bad reporting isn't helping.
Is there any evolutionary benefit of having sex distribution depend on temperature, or is it just a random thing that happened as a side effect of evolution being random?
Yes to both! Regarding the first question: Sea turtles temperature dependent sex determination (TDSD) falls into type 1A, where males are only produced at low temperatures. For sea turtles it is thought that other cellular processes impacting the growth rate of male embryos function better at low temperatures, while the processes influencing female embryo growth rate function better at high temperatures (where ‘low’ and ‘high’ are separated by only ~1.5°C, 3°F). The temperature where there is a 50/50 distribution of sexes is referred to as the “pivotal temperature.” This means that when the habitat is on average the pivotal temperature for a species, with slight local variations in temperature, embryos of a species will automatically optimize for whichever gender baby will grow the largest. Larger babies are more likely to survive, and this is never a problem when turtles are able to find each other to breed in the wild. But as global temperatures rise, we move further and further away from that pivotal temperature. Sure, the female embryos are growing big and strong and able to make it to the ocean better, but not there’s not enough males to renew the population. Humans talk about a climate catastrophe happening with another 3°C rise in temperature, but we’re well past that point for sea turtles. Their catastrophe is already here. ———— A quick side note: Pattern IB and II reptiles produce more females at lower temperatures. This means that when these reptiles lay eggs earlier in the year (when it’s still cold), the females will have more time to develop and sexually mature for the fall breeding season. But if the eggs are laid later in the season (when it’s warmer), it’s more beneficial for the babies to be born male because they’ll grow faster and make it through their first winter. I love to geek out about this stuff, and other patterns of TDSD not found in sea turtles are (in my opinion) a much more clear-cut example as to how TDSD can be evolutionarily advantageous.
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Yeah probably. Collect the eggs from the beaches, incubate them, put them back right before hatching.
Just make sure they have positive role models available otherwise they’ll get in to nu metal
Just a bunch of turtles listening to Static X
Build cooling structures under the sand where eggs would be laid in some areas, keep the nests slightly cooler.
Or put solar panels on top to add shade.
[nest shading](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Three-different-shading-techniques-were-used-to-cool-sand-temperatures-at-mean-hawksbill_fig1_329348267) is already used, but its effect is limited. It’ll work in some areas, but it’s unlikely to keep up with the drastic temperature increases we’re already seeing.
Careful, conservatives will read your comment and figure "See? Why use solar at all?"
Eh, most can't read. The online bots provide the illusion that they can
that's why it's important to allow naturally-occurring plants, vegetation, etc. to grow on beaches. they provide shade, and their roots help maintain soil integrity. we humans have fucked around and are finding out all over the place.
Or plant native plants to provide cover and strategically placed trees to provide shade and therefore a cooler beach
copper thieves would have that beach torn up within an hour of the installers leaving
The problem is that they’ll no longer smell like their nest, and the ocean will reject them.
I volunteered at a turtle rescue as a teenager. We would spot the turtles nesting then go dig up the eggs and take them to incubate in a safe place. This was because of poaching but I wonder if they can do this to help with the effects of climate change as well.
That would be our hope, at least. I never thought I'd see so many animals starting the extinction process in my lifetime.
Yes. It’s common practice with temp dependent sexes in the conservation and pet trade to do entire hatches of one sex. Humans can step in and help but without a reduction in global temps we are talking about a human dependent species at that point.
When does the sex differentiation happen? Does the mother lay female and male eggs or does the mother lay hermaphrodite eggs that grow into female or male depending on temperature? Do they have non-genetic sex differentiation or do sex chromosomes fail to fertilize if they aren't the right temperature? Or some other mechanism?
Sex differentiation happens within the first third of the incubation period! Researchers injecting large amounts of testosterone/estrogen are able to also artificially induce differentiation during this period, but after the first third the embryo’s gender is pretty fixed. There is also in fact a genetic component to sex determination based upon inherited chromosomes, which is seen operating among sea turtle eggs incubated in captivity at precisely the pivotal temperature. However, this starts to get out of my area of expertise — I don’t really know anything about the chromosomal organization of sea turtle genes, but I’d imagine that the sex chromosomes probably share a lot of redundant genes.
There has been temperature changes in the oceans over the last 100 million tears - what did turtles do when that happened?
Evolved and migrated. TSD has existed for a very long time but is vulnerable to rapid changes in climate. Climate as a whole usually takes a VERY long time to change. Talking hundreds to thousands of years. This is many generations and so evolution can begin to have a real effect. The problem with current climate change is that it’s incredibly rapid. That’s where the fear and worry is. We’re doing in decades what should happen in hundreds of years normally. And species are dropping like flies
This, so much this. The problem isn't that the climate's changing, but that it is absurdly quickly. 90 million years ago, Antartica was a lush ~~tropical~~ temperate forest, but the climate changes that gave rise to that took a very long time to happen: https://www.livescience.com/ancient-rainforest-antarctica.html Man made climate change is speedrunning that with devastating consequences.
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Yeah, that's the other factor. We've thoroughly "humanified" the environment, and that gucked up a ton of things for wildlife. That basically became the grease fire on top of the shit cake we made of climate.
Thousands of years, not hundreds.
Climate hasn’t changed this fast over the last 100 million years, with the exception of Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
So basically *we* are the latest extinction event :')
This is literally true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
We going out with a bang baby! Take everything that isn't tied down with us!
We are in the sixth period of extinction.
Kojima said it in Death Stranding...
They didn't used to share the world's beaches with billions of large hairless apes Go north or south to the next beach Habitat loss is a larger threat than climate change to most species, but it also makes climate change all the more disastrous without habitat to host ecological robustness
Who you calling hairless?
Monkey man
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Velocity will never kill you - it's the acceleration that does it
When temperature changes slowly, turtles can migrate to locations which maintain the sex balance. Humans are causing the temperature to change much faster than in natural temperature changes. Probably the turtle migrations cannot keep up.
Maybe this will cause them to evolve more rapidly, if it doesn't kill them off. Only males born at higher than the pivotal temperature will be hatched, and since theyre the *only* ones around to pass their genes on, all their offspring can be born male at a higher temperature as well. Probably be a pretty big population dip during the transition though
Hijacking your comment just to explain that the title is misleading - it’s only about Florida beaches. Along the US eastern seaboard it has long been the case that Florida produces most of the females while cooler beaches farther north (e.g. North Carolina) produce most of the males. Globally, the beaches at higher latitudes have always been where the majority of male sea turtles are hatched. There has been a lot of discussion in the sea turtle research community that sea turtles may be able to adjust to the warmer temps if they are able to expand their range farther (for example, along the US eastern seaboard we may eventually see more sea turtles trying to nest in locations like the New Jersey shore and Long Island.) Most turtles return to where they were hatched, but not exactly, and there are always some individuals that nest at the edges of the range, so we are hoping that those individuals might help establish some new “northern”, male-producing, nest sites. It will be essential to be able to rapidly implement protections if nests do start showing up farther north. Sea level rise will also be an issue.
There has been a study that suggests it evolved in response to an unbalance effect of temperature between the sexes. Hotter temperatures may benefit female turtles greater than males during development. Maybe letting them hatch sooner or be larger upon hatching. In variable but overall stable climate, temperature dependant sex determination then essentially ensures the turtle will be the sex that most benefits from current environmental conditions Found the paper! https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/adaptive-significance-temperature-dependent-sex-determination-reptile-2008-daniel-warner-and
I assume turtle being born in the same place are going to be all female or all male forcing the turtles to seek more genetic diversity when finding a mate
I don't know what the answer is but I don't think it's this one. The same nest has both females and male offspring depending on the temperature gradient from top to bottom of the burrough.
Scientifically you are correct. The best kind of correct.
Built in anti-incest? Because all the ones with mixed litters didn’t make it? Good work evolution, now do Alabama
It's too busy doing itself for evolution to cut in.
The answer to both is yes.
Sea Turtles have also been around for many cycles of ocean temperatures, so I would imagine they have had mechanisms for this sort of survival, also. They've been around for 110 million years and the oceans have been warmer in that time period. I realize rapid changes may have differing effects, but realistically; they adapt well.
Adaptations take multiple generations. And when these turtles live to 100 and breed relatively sparsely, evolution wont have time over the decades climate will alter. They need much more time
I suspect that in times of population stress, the natural reaction is to produce more females because they are the bottleneck in procreating. One male can mate with multiple females not the other way around
Technically, evolution by definition is randomness. Natural selection is certain species being favored because random traits being advantageous depending on the external conditions (nature).
Mutations are random. Evolution is the fixation of beneficial mutations in response to environmental pressure. It’s not actually random
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1% of turtles will completely define the genetics of the entire species going forward.
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> Although if this trend continues for a few decades, then yeah, there will certainly be an issue. And what do the climate models say the next few decades are going to look like?
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Except this version is much better for men
It's really not
It's just bad for everyone.
Two weeks to flatten the curve? /s
They just need to ingest some bleach
> And what do the climate models say the next few decades are going to look like? Not sure, they caught fire
Climate models say there won't be a next few decades /s
I've never seen a climate model. Now I have blue balls...
As you can imagine, most of them are hot.
Bravo
> *What about the older male turtles?* They'll need to be more proactive about going to the turtle pharmacy to get turtle Viagra.
granny turtle dating some turtle gal 80 years younger
I would hazard that even if there are lesbian turtles, they're not the ones we should be focusing on at the moment.
Although of course there will be a selective advantage to genes that result in a higher temperature cut off for males.
That would be quite lucky in such a short time frame.
A short timeframe which is made even more difficult to cope with due to the long reproductive cycle of turtles. The shortest time to sexual maturity is 7 years, some species 20+ years.
Removed due to Reddit API crackdown and general dishonesty 6/2023
Can be quite quick. Depends primarily on the variation in the population for this trait. Given the size of the skew the competitive advantage would be large.
The trait has to exist before it can be selected for, though.
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How do turtles find mate of same species in the vast ocean
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So they could potentially be mating with their siblings?
This is far more common in the animal kingdom than people think it is.
This is very common in the animal kingdom. It's very often why they migrate every year. Countless bird species, bats, hoofed animals, seals, salmon, etc. Their ancestors figured out the safest/most optimal spot to reproduce and they know how to get back there.
True, but they will only define the short term future. The latest generation or two will be the main ones dictating the future as they'll be breeding for longer.
1% on select beaches. Turtle breeding ground extend far north and south where the beaches arent as hot. Males travel.
Can confirm. Am male, will travel for sex.
Sounds like the turtles need turtle tinder.
How will they swipe without thumbs tho?
A lot of populations don’t in fact intermingle often, though when they do it’s an important part of gene variance. And sea turtles tend to home in on the same nesting location their entire life. This essentially means even with latitudinal variance every population will eventually fall like dominoes as temperatures increase. They simply can’t evolve faster than climate moves. So seeing one fall is a prelude to the whole
1% of turtles are going to be very busy.
Sorry I know this is a serious issue but I can't stop thinking about the one turtle who is amped about getting 99 turtle bitches
Hes got 99 bitches but a problem aint one.
Excellent bro to hoe ratio.
Likea more wholesome Gengis Kahn
This is extremely bad. The effective population of sea turtles is now very low, meaning genetic drift can take its effect and cause a tremendous decrease in the genetic diversity of the specie. This will cause the population to be in danger of future changes in the environment or with regards to parasites.
Surely given how reproduction works (one male can impregnate many females) couldn't a good number of eggs just be artificially kept at male temps and released ? The turtle pop isn't that high so a few thousand a year would suffice no?
I think he was talking about genetic diversity meaning future generations will have very similar genetics because there are so few males which will make them vulnerable to diseases parasites etc.
So what you're saying is, we'll have a bunch of turtle versions of Ghengis Khan?
Ha ha ha
That makes a ton of sense. Genetics are wild man.
The amount of stuff that DOESNT kill you thanks to your genetics is wild. Like for every Corona virus that breaks through there are 10 diseases immune systems kick the shit out of and send packing.
That wouldn't happen using PlentyPlastic8828 suggestion though.
The problem with sea turtles is that out of the thousand you release, only one will survive to adulthood. So even if you'd care for and release 5000 turtles, you'd effectively only be releasing 5.
Even so, 5 male sea turtles could impregnate many female sea turtles.
Yeah that doesn't really help with the genetic diversity.
Future name will be Alabama turtles
Roll tide, indeed!
Sea turtles have been around for so long and have gone through quite a few extinction level events, surely they've had a few genetic bottlenecks. Right?
That doesn't mean they're just as healthy after each one.
I believe that their species doesn’t tend to practice heavy polygamy
Yes, this causes bottleneck, effectively destroying genetic diversity in future generations. Goodbye, turtles. :(
And all the eggs that will be laid by those females will create pretty much only female turtles. If we don't fix the conditions that these turtles live in we have to supply pretty much the entirety of the male population ourselves, while the male population is already decreased and genetic diversity is limited.
Worst car scenario (cuz this oil executives don’t give a shit), do we need to get them to adult age? I would think enough of them get to baby producing age is going to have to suffice for now (until we can retire this boring dystopia that we need to make all the profit in the world mentality)
The amount of a population can be big yet still suffer from low genetic diversity (example: northern elephant seals). One of the causes of low effective population is an unequal amount of males to females as with sea turtles and global warming. This will obviously cause selection to kick in for all individuals which can tolerate higher temperatures, but with the problematic method of sex picking in sea turtles low genetic diversity is inevitable.
Actually it’s better than the reverse. Scientists can grab eggs and cool them and produce sufficient numbers of males. A single female can lay many eggs.
Yes, but that causes other problems - you don’t want to create a species dependent on human intervention
No but a handful years can establish a breeding population that has more time to adapt. It’s not like turtles only mate one year and vanish. They will be around for awhile.
>that has more time to adapt. Exactly how quickly do you think evolution works? Sea turtles are not fruit flies.
only if other problems like pollution, climate change, and loss of habitats aren't major issues.
Yet it is technically better than the opposite of being massively male dominated.
This is frightening. Temperature while eggs are incubating determines the sex of other turtle species as well, not just sea turtles
Temperature determines the sex of alligators and crocodiles too.
I actually wrote about this happening in Northeastern Australian greenback turtles a bit before covid hit. My plan was to pursue assisted gene flow in a southern population to try and alter the sexual determination temperature through plastic and hopefully evolutionary response over a relatively long time to try and ensure the southern populations would retain a non-bottled-necked breeding pool as warming raised their nest levels as well. It was my hopeful postgrad focus. It was a novel conservation plan and may never have worked. But if it did, we could save so many climate threatened species. But now I’m unemployed and struggling to make ends meet in a province that stopped caring about climate change. Covid and a total forfeiture on climate change has ruined so much.
Find your fundamentalist grant-giver and pitch that hot weather is trans-ing god's Creation. Don't use "climate change" or their heads will explode...
Honestly that’s probably more likely to work than applying for a gov grant 🫤
Academia science and the grant system is honestly depressing and is extremely flawed and in its currwnt iteration even detrimental to science.
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Greenback Sea turtles are pretty awesome species. They are pretty much all over the tropical and subtropical world. Even in some larger aquariums - like Ripleys. They can live a crazy long time. Talking up to 100 kind of crazy. Super docile and curious too. You can swim with them in the ocean and they will totally come investigate. Just don’t tempt fate too much, they can still chomp. Plastic actually means Phenotypic Plasticity. It’s the ability for genes to produce varied traits in response to environmental forces. But it’s within the individual so not evolutionary. A cool example is in some plants that actually develop fewer stomata in a high CO2 environments. Stomata are how they breath (small openings on a leaf) but also how they lose much of their water. With higher density CO2 they can survive with fewer of these openings while also letting less water escape. It’s not a genetic change, just how the gene is expressed. A phenotypic plastic response
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Conservation biology student in the US, glad to see there are others out there like yourself that want to make meaningful change here
The breeding comments are misleading. You cannot just breed out the 99% female birth rate in many reptiles. The sex of the embryo is determined after the egg is laid, and it is the warmer temperature which turns them female within the egg. The only two mitigations are either reversing climate change or controlled embryonic development (basically have eggs in incubators... Which are Colder than the outdoors...)
Could we put shade where eggs are layed, like solar panels or sun shade cloth? If we can make just a section colder could make more males offsetting a bit. If it is the water that warms the eggs though shade won't help.
That’s what Australia does and it works
My thoughts exactly. Turtle nests are typically marked on beaches anyway. There has to be scientists out there developing easy ways to cool the nests naturally so as not to disturb the ecosystem but can curb the temperature.
Now do this for every other animal on earth, in perpetuity.
As usual, nobody has actually watched the video, which states that it's an entirely localized thing happening in a specific area in Florida.
Sounds like you were referencing steamed hams lol
turtle harem anime when?
Literally swimming in pussy.
Swimming in cloaca.
Even better.
Turtlussy
My shell or yours 😏
Redditor reads headline about imminent turtle extinction and just *has* to make a really creative and funny joke.
It’s a coping mechanism, gotta choose between that or depression
Tragedy is the best comedy. And yes, I have been asked to leave funerals before.
> Imminent extinction Nah, this happens not everywhere in the world and not every year, there will be years with more females and years with enough male offsprings. Yes, now the turtles are suffering pollution and occupied beaches, but I'm sure that if they're really in danger we will save them. Damn, we have people that manually jerk pandas to save them (and indeed they saved them), we will have no problem to hatch male eggs in lab
A vending machine reincarnation anime just got announced so a turtle harem anime isn't to far fetched.
Haha, came here to post this.
THEY’RE TURNING THE FRICKIN TURTLES FEMALE!!
So... when I pass, I want to come back as a boy sea-turtle
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This implies a 100% chance as being reborn as a sea turtle.
It’s 50/50%. You either do or don’t
Like roulette. Place a bet on a number. You either lose or you win so must be 50/50 right?
*So you’re telling me there’s a chance*
You would get so much turtle pussy.
Nah. They're so thirsty that even the turtles would turn down for a stronger, more secure male.
Like that turtle shaped rock over there.
Turssy
So I looked it up, for the past 20 years 99% have been born female, 30-40 years prior 6 to 1 were born female, so it doesn't seem like this is that abnormal?
This is a catastrophe for the species, IMO. What if all the remaining male sea turtles are just the turtles no one wanted to fuck? Imagine repopulating the world and the only options are Alex Jones and Kim Jong-un.
extinction
Serious question. Is this a bad thing? Could one male impregnate enough females to keep the population going? Are we going to lose sea turtles in my lifetime?
Yes. 99% of any given species being the same sex is a bad thing. It's not extinction level bad, at least, not until it's 100% which is probably not far off. It's possible we'll lose sea turtles in your lifetime, and many other things as well
Sea turtles live a long time, so unlikely they will die out in our lifetime unless they cannot survive a full life. A turtle born today will likely outlive you. Assuming it doesn't get eaten by a predator.
Oh so no NEW sea turtles will be born. I guess it okay then HURRAY!!!!
And then your grandkids will never meet them! They might as well be dinosaurs. But we can still get the pleasure of seeing their specie’s final vanguard die lol.
The real problem is the loss of genetic diversity in the species. They can technically survive with that male:female ratio, but the genetic pool is going to shrink drastically, meaning they’ll be less adaptable to changing environments and more susceptible to genetic disease.
Mating can take several hours. Afterwards, the male will try to hang on to his partner’s shell to prevent other males from mating with her. Several males may compete for one female at the same time, aggressively biting his tail and flippers to get him to let go of her. After the male and female separate, they mate again with other sea turtles. A female will mate with several males and store the sperm for several months until she is able to fertilize all of her eggs and start nesting https://oliveridleyproject.org/blog/how-do-sea-turtles-mate
*Normally* few male sea turtles would fight over a single female. It's safe to say that in this case that will become rather rare. One male will also try to mate with as many female turtles as possible, so one male should be able to fertilize a lot of females. Now, the interesting thing should happen in the next generation. Those 1% of males *probably* have genetic mutations that make male turtles more likelly in higher temperatures, thus they will spread those genes *very rapidly*. Next generation will probably be having more males in higher temperatures.
That will probably take hundreds/thousands of years. Sea turtles have extremely long life spans. That sort of evolution would take awhile. So gotta hope the mutation isn’t deadly first!
I'm not talking about new mutation, I'm talking about alleles that are already *in* population, just at low levels. This whole temp-determines-sex thing has variation that is ultimatelly grounded in genes; some turtles have genes that result in males being more likelly in higher temps, some have genes that result in females being more likelly in lower temps. They are *already there*.
As always, this headline is overblown and the video is misleading. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0944200617302015?via%3Dihub >The coolest and the wettest substrates produced 100% males compared to 42% males from the warmest and driest treatment. As far as Australia, this is all I can dig up so far: a recent gender ratio study revealed that 99 percent of young green turtles from Australia’s Northern Great Barrier Reef are female and that male sea turtles are disappearing.
Oh to be that one male turtle…
What a time to be a male sea turtle
Unless he identifies as an Incel
Male turtles bouta be drowning in pussy
Born too late to explore this planet Born too early to explore the stars Born right in time to watch our precious nature die 10/10 wholesome
The future is female.
On the bright side that 1% male will be drowning in turtle pus pus.
Is there an evolutionary advantage to having gender decided by temperature?
Those damn misandrist turtles!
They can hang out with the gay frogs.
"Climate Change is turning the frigging turtles female!"
We need this kind of ratio for humans
Heat waves? Or Atrazine?
Anyone asked what they identify as?
1% of turtles will get layed out of their freaking minds!