More Global Warming Fallout: World’s First Mutant Sharks
Climate change’s slow, steady, and unimpeded march toward total world domination has claimed another victim: Australian sharks who prefer making whoopee within their own species.
Scientists in the land Down Under have discovered the world’s first hybrid sharks, reports Discovery News. The newly created predators—57 wild specimens to be exact—are a mixture between the common blacktip shark and the Australian blacktip shark, two genetically distinct species.
Who’s to say that come 2345, when Earth is a shell of its 2012 self, the dominant life form won't be some interspecial mad scientist authored mash-up of man and ape?
The interspecial bootknocking could be an indicator that the animals are being forced to adapt to warming waters, say scientists.
"Hybridization could enable the sharks to adapt to environmental change as the smaller Australian blacktip currently favors tropical waters in the north while the larger common blacktip is more abundant in sub-tropical and temperate waters along the south-eastern Australian coastline," said Jennifer Ovenden, an expert in genetics of fisheries species and a member of the scientific team behind the discovery.
If the hybrid is found to be genetically stronger than its parent species—if survival of the fittest indeed plays out in true Darwinian fashion—it may eventually outlast its so-called pure-bred predecessors.
"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 road map that we've generated from these animals," said Colin Simpfendorfer, a scientist who worked on the study.
This mind-blowing story prompts a smorgasbord of unanswered questions: Does a hybrid shark have double the taste for human blood? Does this mean that the producers of Deep Blue Sea will fast-track a sequel? What hand, if any, did shark-finning play in this development? Mostly, though, this one nagging thought won't go away: Will mankind be forced to interspecially breed to save itself from climate change?
When this fascinating 2009 National Geographic story covered the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, it posed some soul-searching questions about the future of human evolution:
Will our descendants hurtle through space as relatively unchanged as the humans on the starship Enterprise? Will they be muscle-bound cyborgs? Or will they chose to digitize their consciousnesses—becoming electronic immortals?
Four possible evolutionary outcomes were outlined: a) Human Evolution Is Dead b) Humans Will Continue to Evolve c) Humans Will Achieve Electronic Immortality d) A New Era of Evolution Awaits on Off-World Colonies.
Today—right here, right now, and especially on the heels of this Aussie shark tale—“B” seems likely.
After millions of years of evolution, where species siphoned themselves off into increasingly specialized sub-species, can anyone say definitively that climate change will not cause the genus Homo to one day do the opposite—to reconnect with our ancestral descendants? Who’s to say that come 2345, when Earth is a shell of its 2012 self, the dominant life form won't be some interspecial mad scientist authored mashup of man and ape? Or maybe man and dolphin—remember, they’re the second smartest mammal on the planet?
So many questions, so few answers.
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