Finding Refuge For Salmon, Cold Water Preferred

So for the past several class periods, besides working on our storyboard projects, our topic of discussion was climate change and what that means, more specifically how it affects the oceans and the shores with rising sea levels. We’ve talked about how climate change can impact the environment and us, but we haven’t really discussed the impact global warming has on organisms other than human beings, especially those of the aquatic environment. This article discusses salmon and how the warming of bodies of water has impacted its ecological standing in certain ways.

Environments are changing due to temperatures rising and it impacts organisms who thrive in certain environments over others. For example, salmon thrive in cold waters. Thus, the warming of water poses a problem to the community of salmon living in waters that are getting warmer. Migrations of salmon have changed so that new colder environments are now increasing in populations of salmon. This can have potentially drastic changes because the ecology of the environment is shifted when there is a shift in the population of organisms. Introducing new organisms can cause an unbalance in the relationships between organisms already present.

There were talks human intervention to make sure there are no harmful effects of new salmon migration patterns. Previous human intervention in the form of hatcheries have wiped away the diversity within salmon making them all uniform and unable to adapt to a new environment. So human intervention may have only limited results.

A common theme I have noticed is that we are always trying to fix the problems we have caused. A salmon expert in this article says that “we’re doing a lot of the easy things, and they’re great, but they’re not enough. It’s always a question about how catch up with climate change but as the article says, how far can we go? I guess one thing to keep in the back of ours minds is how much can we do to prevent a global event?

In the afternoon session, there were many posters that lined the walls and boards of the Macaulay building today and as I was walking around, I saw a lot of posters that did seem very interesting. However, I also saw a large number of posters that had many words, which we discussed in class as not that effective as a presentation. But there were few that caught my eye, which had many diagrams and limited text, such as one about measles and another about the Ebola virus.

One specific poster did catch my eye, both because of the nice color scheme as well as the amount of graphs and pictures they possessed. This was their title: “Smart Genes: Inherited Intelligence.” The authors were focusing on the extent to which intelligence was inherited. I was already interested in the topic of intelligence and differences in IQ tests and the explanations behind it. In psych class, we talked about the significance of an IQ test result and what that means to an individual. So I stood there and struck a conversation with the creators of this poster.

It was really fascinating because they discussed several proteins that played a role in determining intelligence. Although I did not get a chance to ask them how specifically they obtained their data, I saw that they determined that 20-40% of a person’s genome that correspond to intelligence is passed on into their child. Then, we both discussed the impact it has on the debate of nature vs. nurture. Many are under the misconception that intelligence has to do solely with how a person is brought up, or “nurture.” However, it is not entirely true. Since intelligence can be inherited, there is an extent to which “nature” plays a role. We also then discussed if there was any possible way that the child can inherit more of the genome coding for intelligence factors, in order to increase intelligence. It is possible today or in the near future, however, there are a multitude of risks as well as ethical dilemmas that come with it. I just thought it was different to think about intelligence in the sense that it is from your parents. So, I guess there’s more to thank them for.