[dllthomas]

Your neighbors should publish a paper, so we can fold these observations into our predictions, if they correlate with future weather while being uncorrelated with the other sources of information.

Or if it's really that accurate, sell the info to people trading orange juice and become stinkin' rich.

More likely, as you say, it's just confirmation bias. It'd be surprising if the relevant patterns were simple enough for caterpillar and tree biology to pick up on but too complex for our climatologists and meteorologists to spot in decades of PhD students looking for theses. It's not impossible, though.

[d23]

> More likely, as you say, it's just confirmation bias. It'd be surprising if the relevant patterns were simple enough for caterpillar and tree biology to pick up on but too complex for our climatologists and meteorologists to spot in decades of PhD students looking for theses. It's not impossible, though.

Right. Most caterpillars and trees I know have only had their PhDs for 5 years or so.

[dllthomas]

Well, I think it's unlikely, but not as unlikely as your quip (while amusing!) would imply. The computations would be performed on fuzzy caterpillar and apple tree hardware, but the correlations would have been discovered and tuned by natural selection over many iterations.

[lwhalen]

if there's anything this crowd can get behind, it's fuzzy logic and apple hardware.

[dllthomas]

Very nice! I had considered going the fuzzy logic route, but missed the other.

[manicdee]

Well, something that anemometers, thermometers, hygrometers and pyrometers can't tell you is what the air smells like.

If the animals that reacted differently, for example, to air with a different blend of gasses, and that different behaviour caused that animal to survive the surprise snow storm, you'd expect that this behaviour would become more widespread in later populations of that animal.

The genetic "memory" of the cold event would be carried by the surviving population, since only animals with behaviours that contribute to surviving the cold event end up procreating.

Now what if caterpillars change colour in response to atmospheric gasses, temperature, or diet? Would a caterpillar that changes colour with temperature be a suitable indicator of a coming cold snap?

http://mamajoules.blogspot.com.au/2008/10/caterpillars-chang...

So I recommend everyone start a macrophotography habit, keep photographing the insect life in your neighbourhood with geotagging turned on, upload to Flickr, and then the climate scientists of the world will have something to work on.

[dllthomas]

That's roughly how it would happen if it happens. I think it's unlikely that they predicted that this winter would be especially cold because I think the causes of this winter being especially cold are unlikely to be local. A caterpillar in Georgia could respond to the temperature, pressure, atmospheric mix, humidity, or whatever in Georgia; it cannot respond to, say, pressure differentials between Georgia and New York.