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Earth Science

Many Animals Can't Adapt Fast Enough To Climate Change (wired.com) 214

Posted by msmash from the reality-check dept.
A new paper in Nature Communications, coauthored by more than 60 researchers, sifted through 10,000 previous studies and found that the climatic chaos we've sowed may just be too intense for many animals to survive. From a report: Some species seem to be adapting, yes, but they aren't doing so fast enough. That spells, in a word, doom. To determine how a species is adjusting to a climate gone mad, you typically look at two things: morphology and phenology. Morphology refers to physiological changes, like the aforementioned shrinking effect; phenology has to do with the timing of life events such as breeding and migration. The bulk of the existing research concerns phenology. The species in the new study skew avian, in large part because birds are relatively easy to observe. Researchers can set up nesting boxes, for instance, which allow them to log when adults lay eggs, when chicks hatch, how big the chicks are, and so on. And they can map how this is all changing as the climate warms.

By looking at these kinds of studies together, the authors of the Nature Communications paper found that the 17 bird species they examined seem to be shifting their phenology. "Birds in the Northern Hemisphere do show adaptive responses on average, though these adaptive responses are not sufficient in order for populations to persist in the long term," says lead author Viktoriia Radchuk of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.
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Many Animals Can't Adapt Fast Enough To Climate Change More

Many Animals Can't Adapt Fast Enough To Climate Change

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  • Maybe (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:13PM (#58981268)

    But focussing on the birds that stay around to study doesn't mean that the smart birds aren't flying somewhere else, where it is better for them while scientists study the stupid ones who will die out.

    It's usually only a few, sometimes _very_ few, who adapt and who are the parents of the new future generations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Birds aren't that smart, for the most part. They go back to the same places over and over and if you destroy those habitats they just die. The ones that survive by moving do so by accident rather than by being smart.

  • The Chinese aren't going to fix climate change and neither are Americans. Those two countries alone are responsible for almost 50% of the worlds pollution and CO2 (obviously it depends a bit on how you slice the numbers). So, the point is, climate change is coming. It's going to kill a few people, too. It's also going to make life better for some as their climate becomes more bearable or productive. *Shrug* Them's the brakes kids.
    • So far as the U.S. goes, when we get the criminal-in-chief out of the Whitehouse and into an orange jumpsuit, and someone who isn't as crooked as the day is long and dumber than a box of rocks into the Whitehouse, we might have a chance to do something on our end. Would that be enough? Crystal ball says "probably not". It's not just China, it's also India, so far as I know. Fact of the matter is, it may already be too late for anything anyone does to have enough of an effect to reverse things.

      As an aside

  • Has to do with mobility and range (Score:3)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:22PM (#58981316) Homepage Journal

    Birds literally can change flight paths and regions, and by doing so, aid plants in adapting (they eat them and the seeds fall out of their scat).

    Small mammals like pikas are range bound, living near mountain peaks. They tend to move up or down, but when they are at the peak, find it difficult to migrate to another mountain if they're living in very high mountains.

    Larger mammals can migrate, but risk predation by doing so. Frequently this involves moving large segments of entire herds by helicopter, and this has been done for bison and moose and elk and wolves and bears.

    Fish can move, but are impacted by not doing so quickly. One method is to move farmed fish or hatchery fish further north/south to where they will need to be, thus reducing both wild/hatchery competition and due to eventual intermixture at sea, moving the species. Stream/lake bound fish need to be stocked in their new locations, which humans are resistant to doing. The act of stocking can also move plants fish use.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Small mammals like pikas are range bound, living near mountain peaks. They tend to move up or down, but when they are at the peak, find it difficult to migrate to another mountain if they're living in very high mountains.

      Marie Antoinette: "Let them call Uber".

    • or an entire army of bison and moose and elk and wolves and bears with helicopters migrating. Who even gives bison and moose and elk and wolves and bears helicopters? That's just crazy.

      • or an entire army of bison and moose and elk and wolves and bears with helicopters migrating. Who even gives bison and moose and elk and wolves and bears helicopters? That's just crazy.

        Oh, please, we've been doing this for decades in BC, AB, WA, ID, MT, OR, and CA.

        Stop pretending it's a big deal.

        Oh, and did I mention they're in the Top Gun sequel? One is Tom Cruise's wingman, callsign Bi-Son.

    • It's much more complicated than that. Animals can't move any faster than their food can move, and eventually, down the food chain, their food is plant based. The problem is that entire ecosystems have to move. That takes many, many human lifetimes to happen. There's no getting around the fact that people are going to have a really difficult time on this planet for the next few hundred, if not few thousand years.

      • There's a difference between dealing with what the climate deniers already caused, which is the baked in climate change, and giving up.

        The main problem is the longer you all take to wake up and realize this will keep getting increasingly worse, the more expensive all of this will be.

        But it's not impossible, just becoming more and more expensive.

        On the other hand, 80 percent of insect species are pretty much doomed. Nobody ever really cared about them.

    • Don't you think the paper would take bird movement into consideration? Actually, reading the paper, they might have, but I don't see where.

  • Yep many critters (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:29PM (#58981354)
    maybe even humanity! Time will Tell

    Just my 2 cents ;)

  • then we'd better get hot (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:41PM (#58981416) Journal
    Then we'd better get hot; switch to nuclear for our energy, and find technological solutions to sequester CO2.

  • Not the worst that's happened. (Score:3)

    by McFortner ( 881162 ) on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @04:41PM (#58981418)
    Many animals couldn't adapt to the Chicxulub impact fast enough either, but life is still here 66 million years later.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Empiric ( 675968 )

      We must protect {arbitrary animals} from {selected arbitrary environmental pressures} for the benefit of {other arbitrary animals}, in a manner that gives us {arbitrary paychecks}.

    • but life is still here

      No, "still here" is not an accurate way to describe that. "Life came back eventually."

      Life will come back from this too, that is true.

    • Many animals couldn't adapt to the Chicxulub impact fast enough either, but life is still here 66 million years later.

      This happened because at the time there were no humans around with the observational technology to see Chicxulub coming, and no Elon Musk with the engineering tech to bat it aside in time.

      Life adapts to changing conditions. Intelligent life with technology adapts even faster.

    • I guess we need to jump in that time machine to skip over the next million years then.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Most people feel that there is a moral difference between a natural disaster that they have no ability to control, and causing a disaster that they could have taken steps to avert.

  • For example, lobsters [lobsteranywhere.com] always had a hard time to survive a sudden climate change.

  • It just adds evidence to the established scientific knowledge:

    Climate change 10,000x faster than evolution [seeker.com]

  • the climatic chaos we've sowed

    [citation needed]

  • Many Animals Can't Adapt Fast Enough To Climate Change

    Congresscritters seem especially resistant.

  • are there really this many climate change deniers that are also regular slashdot readers? (regular enough to post within say 5 hours of the story breaking). Or is it like the troll bots of various stripes that are omnipresent.

    I just dont get why people wouldn't acknowledge climate change. I find it more plausible actually that most of these posts ARE bots. I just don't believe people are that dumb.

  • Foreword: Whatever its cause, I think climate change is a serious problem, and humankind is the only species on the planet that is capable of solving it (even if that involves putting nature to work on the problem, i.e. planting trees or bioengineering or whatever).

    Ignoring the reduction in land area caused by rising sea levels, isn't it supposed to take a few decades for the actual climate to be a major problem, and several more to reach biblical proportions? As in major problems by around 2050 and Brazil

  • Including ourselves, the climate will change, our civilization will collapse, if we survive as species we will revert back to hunter gatherers, marveling over ancient ruins . News at 11, it's happened before, it is happening again.

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