A report in Science that global warming can be tied, via a neat Darwinian case of relaxed selection, to shrinking stature among prospering wild sheep on a British islet would attract plenty of reporters in any case. The yarn is all over today with perhaps some extra credit due the locale of its press conference yesterday: Central Hall Westminster, London, during the World Conference of Science Journalists. So, some participants were able to file  breaking yarns and maybe make their editors happier to pay the expense accounts. One would think so. But the standard search does not reveal a hoped for bonus of obscure smaller outlets form all over the globe filing on it. (The Tracker keeps writing yarn because it’s about sheep and I’m a sucker for dumb word play. Maybe I can work in skein, and tangled tale, knitting facts, tying up loose ends, flocks, and other wooly metaphors and puns …. on second thought, better knot – er, groan, not).

The news is elegant and in a way a cheery departure from the usual run of global warming’s effects (acid oceans, drowned coast lines, confused migrating animals, baby walruses abandoned at sea, ice cap mayhem, drought and flood and disease and all the miserable rest of it with worse to come…). It is that in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, on the Isle of Hirta, wild Soay sheep that have lived there for 4000 years or so are tending toward smaller size – down 5 percent in the past 25 years or so. This has been noticed before. Now comes the surmised reason: life became easier, not harder, for them as temperatures rose over recent decades. Nature used to cull many of the smaller ones without the body reserves to survive harsh winters, especially young, small ewes trying to get lambs through their first year. Now more of the young mums and any other smallish members of the tribe make it. So they say. Still uncertain, apparently,  is whether the population’s underlying gene pool is starting to shift, too.

It appears nearly impossible, in this story, not to use the alliterative verb “to shrink” for a headline when the subject is sheep.

Stories datelined London, or by London-based outfits, presumably from the meeting (looks like the regulars in UK major media doing most of it):

• Best hed award: Independent (editorial): Bleating obvious ;
• Independent – Steve Connor: How global warming shrank St Kilda’s sheep ; St. Kilda is, it says here, the archipelago that includes Hirta Isl.
• BBC – Victoria Gill: Climate change is shrinking sheep ;
• Times – Hannah Devlin: Latest threat from global warming: shrinking sheep ;
• Guardian – David Adam: Scientists solve mystery of Scotland’s shrinking sheep ; and by the way, the site reveals these sheep have been evolutionary exemplars for some time:  Guardian – Ian Sample: Soays’ natural selection on the hoof ; From early last year, a report on the changing complexions of the sheep.
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Climate change makes sheep shrink ; Tracker’s not sure about the declaration in the lede, promoted by press material, that “survival of the fittest and natural selection usually menas that species grow bigger as they evolve…”; Island dwarfism among mammals is pretty common, is it not?
• Exuberant word play award : Telegraph (editorial): Sheep may safely shrink ; And at this rate, the paper’s editorial staff waggishly calculates, they’ll vanish altogether in 300 years due to the overturning of the law of the survival of the fattest.
• Sheepish pun in a hed award: Daily Mail – David Derbyshire: Lowering the baa (or how our sheep are shrinking) ;
• Reuters – Ben Hirschler: Climate change shrinks Scotland’s wild sheep ;

Stories filed from elsewhere  :

• Scotsman – John Ross: Scientists say they’ve solved riddle of the shrinking Soay sheep ;
• LA Times – Karen Kaplan: Sheep getting smaller in Scotland due to climate change, study says ;
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Baaad news? Global warming now shrinking sheep ;
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang :  The case of the shrinking sheep ; Short, and among the few that note an element in the ecoystem that invites confident analysis: it is simple. There are sheep. There is vegetation. No predators, no competitors.
• Time Magazine – Kenneth Walsh: The Incredible Shrinking Sheep of Scotland ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Nayanah Siva: Secret of Scotland’s Shrinking Sheep Solved ;
• Science News – Susan Milius: Climate Change Shrinks Sheep ;

Grist for the Mill:

Imperial College London Press Release; Science Abstract ; AAAS/Science Press Release ;

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Science Stories. 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.