People, Planet, Profits & Projects

Photo courtesy of Pensthorpe National park - http://www.pensthorpe.com/animal/barnacle-goose/

Today’s tongue-twister (say that title five times fast!) is brought to you by Branta leucopsis.  This is a species of bird commonly known as the barnacle goose (see photo).  And although this will be about geese and migration and climate, it will have a project management angle. 
Let’s start by decomposing the title of the blog post. See what I did there?  Right away, a key PM term! 

• Flapping: in this case, flapping is referring to flying, and in particular, migratory flying
• Fowl: the general name for geese, ducks, chickens, and balls hit out of bounds in baseball, or an illegal play in basketball, if you allow for misspelled versions of the word…
• Phenological: having to do with phenomena such as migrations related to the effects of climate.
• Phasing: here we refer to getting ‘out of phase’ in terms of migration – that is, leaving, or arriving, at the wrong time so that the migration does not fulfill its objective, which is usually to arrive so that mating and offspring have high probabilities of success.
• Fatalities: unfortunately, due to changes in climate, the survival rates of offspring have been dropping, as you will see in this post and in the referenced articles.

This post was triggered by the hours-old article on NPR’s Science pages, Migrating Arctic Geese Are Confused, Exhausted By Rising Temperatures.  Yes, somehow, not only did this catch my eye, but it caught my attention as a project manager.  Why?  A big point of this article relates to a fixed starting time for a task.  As PMs, we know all about task dependencies, and the danger – or at least the constraining effect – of fixed dates on our schedule.

In this case, the schedule is about survival of a species, and the task is the migration to the north for Branta Leucopsis, so as to maximize arrival at nesting grounds during a “food peak”.

According to the article as well as other scientific research recently published, such as this article from Current Biology, there are now earlier springs in the Arctic.  This means the geese should be changing their departure time to arrive properly during the “food peak” to benefit their goslings.  From the articles:

Historically, the geese have arrived just after the snow melts and lay their eggs right away. That gives plants time to start growing so that the goslings can benefit from what is known as a "food peak."

These days, the weather in parts of the journey north is warmer than it used to be and the birds seem to realize that they're running late. They start to speed up — a lot.

A journey that usually takes the barnacle geese a month now takes about a week, the researchers found. It's a marathon: "They fly nearly nonstop from the wintering areas to their breeding grounds," Bart Nolet (a researcher from the University of Amsterdam) says.

Even though they make up time on the way (crashing the schedule!), the exhausted geese can't lay eggs right away because they need time to forage and recover — some 10 more days. 

That means the goslings are no longer able to enjoy that tasty and nutritious "food peak," as Nolet put it. Instead, "when the eggs hatch, the food is already deteriorating in quality, and what we found (in this research project) is that goslings survive less well in such an early year than they do normally."

This is where that ‘fixed start date’ comes in.  The trigger for this their departure – the dependency, if you will, is not temperature, but light and length of days, says the research.  The distance between their North Sea residence and the breeding grounds in the Arctic, after all, is more than 3000 miles (see figure below).  The geese, unlike project managers, with excellent information systems with the latest compiled data, information, and knowledge, don’t have any idea of the weather 3000 miles away, they only have the current and very local information on which to make their decisions.

And here’s the thing – it’s not just geese.  In fact, geese, due to their ‘flocking’ behavior may actually have an advantage in that they may be a bit more flexible, following any ‘leaders’ who leave earlier.  Other birds – shore birds, may not have this flexibility and may be even more prone to climactic changes that could be very debilitating to survival.

Generally, climate change is likely to create this kind of mismatch for animals that migrate long distances. It's harder for them to adjust, Nolet says, when they spend part of the year in a totally different climate

This is another example of how changes to the climate remind us of the need to aim at reductions in the causes and to be more aware of the effects and the surprising relationship of climate change to projects, project management, and project management wisdom.
I invite you to watch this 5-minute video about the migration, and in the video you get to see the Branta leucopsis close up.
 

Blogger's Note: There is indeed a Part 2 coming to "A Complex, Swirling Mess".  But in the interim, I thought I would share this interesting and mildly-related post.

Here's a trivia question for you:

What is it that indirectly contributes US$23 billion (that's with a "b") to the US economy?

• Hint: it uses echolocation (sonar)
• Hint: it uses echolocation to find prey
• Hint: it is a mammal
• Hint: the prey is typically insects
• Hint: it flies... as... in the air
• Hint: the name of the animal can be used as American English adjective for 'crazy'

Got it?

Yes, it's a bat.  Bats help keep plant-eating insects under control by preying on such bugs and also by hunting down bugs that, in turn, prey on pollinator insects.  In short, without them, a natural form of pest-control goes away, and farmers suffer huge losses.

Now, let's apply some of our project management fundamental knowledge. 

To bake a cake, we need to procure the ingredients. We need a recipe.  Those in hand, we can mix the ingredients per the recipe and form a batter.  We then can pour that batter into a pan and put it into a pre-heated oven. Once baked, we can take it out of the oven, let it cool, and apply frosting.  Can we do this in a different order, or can we do these tasks all in parallel?  No.  There are dependencies. 

I can't speed things up by frosting the cake before the baking is done.  I can't mix the ingredients until I have them.  The dependencies define the 'logic' of our schedule and provide a true end-time for the cake being ready to deliver.  Without the dependencies, the entire schedule goes... well, it goes batty.

So that takes us back to the bats.  It turns out that very recent research (Scientific American, Volume 318, Number 5, May 2018) indicates that, possibly because of a warming climate, bats are showing up much earlier than they did as little as 20 years ago, at cave locations where the bats spend the summer consuming crop-eating insects. The bats in question travel from Mexico to a cave near San Antonio, Texas.

The schedule - the natural schedule - calls for the bats to arrive in time for their meal.   But now, the system is 'out of sync'.  It would be equivalent to us putting the raw ingredients in the oven without mixing them, or trying to frost the batter and then baking the cake.

The study referred to in the article was done by the Rothamsted Research laboratory and used data from about 160 US weather stations to analyze activity of these bats from 1995 through 2017.

A separate study in Indiana which was published last year also found that temperature variations affected arrival and departure times of the migrations of bats - another indication of dependency on temperature.  A full-fledged connection to climate change is yet to be made, but there's certainly a suggested link since there is also a corresponding rise in temperatures during this period.

^{Bats exiting Bracken Cave near San Antonio}

I recommend a visit to this site which has the report from the Rothamsted researchers.  I also recommend holding off on frosting that cake until you have taken it out of the oven and let it cool down.