tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

I’m sitting here drinking a Speight’s Gold Medal Ale and feeling pretty ok. I spent today rewriting the first third of a paper dealing with climate change and the freshwater fishes of the Wet Tropics. At first I wasn’t really into it, but over the course of the last 10 hours I’ve found that it is, actually, fascinating. The fish communities of Australia were, it’s thought, pretty well established about 20 Million years ago. Since then, they’ve been through a series of extended climatic uphevals. The last of these began about 10000 years ago and looks set to continue into the future. Basically, the sea level has been rising and we silly humans, with our breweries and what-not look set to keep it going. If we don’t unplug our fridges and start riding bikes to work, we’re not going to be having much fun by the end of the century, and neither are the fish.

The thing is, the fish are probably pretty well adapted to climate change. When sea level was at its highest, about 5000 years ago, it was a metre above the present day mark. As it rose, it pushed the freshwater fishes back across the floodplains (now the continental shelf), and into the hills - which is where they remain, squeezed into the top of what were once these massive catchments. This stressful time probably had the effect of eliminating the weaker species, and not allowing for the stronger ones to specialise and form new species. With little opportunity to do anything the fish just swam around until humans showed up and started creating absolute havoc. In the Mulgrave River catchment, where I’ve been working, over 64% of the freshwater wetlands have been filled in for sugar cane fields in the last 200 years. For the first time the freshwater fish face climate change with the additive pressure of human disturbance. Have we pushed the fish too far? I think so.

Paul, my old officemate and fellow fish-head, and I have this idea. We think we should put the army to work - most of them aren’t doing too much at Lavarack Barracks anyway, unless you count torturing kittens, taking pills, sleeping with 13 yr old girls, and dressing up as the KKK as tactical exercises, then I guess they are doing a lot. We think we should split them into two teams (red and blue maybe) and put one on each bank of the river. Then they could race down each side from top to bottom to see who could revegetate their side fastest. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to worry so much about fish and climate change, and if they’re going to have enough water in Dunedin to brew Gold Medal Ale.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.