Global study of seed consumption uncovers wider risk to plant species

Deborah Smith in the University of New South Wales Newsroom: The first worldwide study of animals and the seeds they eat has overturned a long-held assumption – that large animals mainly eat large seeds. The finding by UNSW Australia scientists has implications for conservation showing that a wider variety of plants than is often thought could be at risk if large animals go extinct and do not disperse their seeds.

In a comprehensive study, UNSW’s Si-Chong Chen and Professor Angela Moles compiled and analysed data on more than 13,000 animal-seed interactions, based on previously published reports. “It is the first broad-scale study of the relationship between animal body mass and ingested seed size ever undertaken,” says Ms Chen, a PhD candidate in the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

“We covered all vertebrate groups – fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. And we included animals from many different areas – from the Arctic tundra to the tropical rainforests.”...The smallest seeds in the study were the tiny seeds of the mountain snowberry, and they were eaten by the smallest animals in the study – skinks on the Chatham Islands near New Zealand. The largest seeds were the 9-centimetre long seeds of the African tropical forest tree, Balanites wilsonia. They were eaten by the largest animals in the study – 4-tonne African elephants.

“It has long been predicted that as the body size of animals increases so does the size of the seeds they ingest,” says Ms Chen. “Big animals do eat some big seeds from fleshy fruits. But the prediction is wrong because it overlooks the fact that big animals like buffalos, cows, deer and zebras also accidentally vacuum up hundreds of small seeds as they graze on short grassy vegetation.”...

Sunflower with bee, shot by Rasbak, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution- Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Sea level rise won’t only affect infrastructure

Scoop via Forest & Bird (New Zealand): The independent conservation organisation Forest & Bird is asking the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) to widen the focus of her next report on climate change-driven sea level rise.

A preliminary report on sea level rise was released by the PCE today. The PCE will release another report next year on the impacts of sea level rise on the most vulnerable areas of coastline around the country, and the risks to infrastructure in those areas.

Forest & Bird Group Manager Campaigns and Advocacy Kevin Hackwell says the next report should also take into account the impacts of sea level rise on our natural coastal ecosystems, and recommend the best ways to deal with sea level rise.

He says some critical natural features could be changed forever by sea level rise. “For example the huge Kaipara Harbour north of Auckland covers 947 square kilometres at high tide, with nearly half of that area exposed as mudflats and sandflats at low tide,” Kevin Hackwell says.

...“Quite a few of our shore birds breed just above the current high tide level on our open coasts or at the head of estuaries. For instance the four remaining nesting sites of New Zealand’s Seabird of the Year, the fairy tern, could be wiped out by storm surges,” Kevin Hackwell says.

“We would also like to see the PCE make recommendations on how sea level rise should be dealt with. Building extensive sea walls is likely to be very expensive, in many places unrealistic, and in the long run may create more problems than they would solve....

Sphinx Rock in Marie's Leg Cove, New Zealand, shot by Pseudopanax, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license 

Thirsty Serengeti wildlife to get new water hole: Lake Victoria

Kizito Makoye in Reuters via the Thomson Reuters Foundation: After decades of struggling to help the wildlife of Serengeti National Park cope with Tanzania's increasingly intense droughts, the government is implementing a controversial plan to use Lake Victoria as an alternative water source for animals.

The project aims to ensure the survival of millions of animals, including the wildebeests and zebras that take part in the Great Migration every year, and involves reviving a 36 sq km (14 sq mile) wildlife corridor by extending the border of the park to Lake Victoria's Gulf of Speke.

But guaranteeing animals safe passage to the second-largest freshwater lake in the world will mean evicting hundreds of families living on the land. Government officials say moving about 8,000 people out of the Speke Game Controlled Area in Bunda district is essential to conserve the Serengeti's ecosystem as it faces worsening drought.

"This process is unavoidable due to the importance of the area to the Serengeti-Maasai Mara ecosystem," said a report from the Mara Regional Consultative Committee (RCC), a government body. "The cost to implement these decisions now is much smaller than [it would be after] waiting for more years."

A member of the RCC told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the project's budget is an estimated $33 million....

A sunset in the eastern Serengeti, shot by Harvey Barrison, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license 

All the world's oceans have plastic debris on their surface

Terra Daily via SPX: ...[S]urface waters of the oceans may not be the final destination of plastic debris since, as indicated by the study performed by the Malaspina Expedition, large amounts of microplastics could be passing to the marine food chain and the ocean floor. Results of the study, led by the University of Cadiz (Spain), have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Andres Cozar, researcher from the University of Cadiz, explains: "Ocean currents carry plastic objects which split into smaller and smaller fragments due to solar radiation. Those little pieces of plastic, known as microplastics, can last hundreds of years and were detected in 88% of the ocean surface sampled during the Malaspina Expedition 2010".

According to the study authors, the results obtained by the Malaspina Expedition show that the problem of plastic waste pollution has a global character. The major residues found are polyethylene and polypropylene, polymers used in the manufacture of everyday products like bags, food and beverage containers, kitchen utensils and toys, among others.

Cozar adds: "These microplastics have an influence on the behavior and the food chain of marine organisms. On one hand, the tiny plastic fragments often accumulate contaminants that, if swallowed, can be passed to organisms during digestion; without forgetting the gastrointestinal obstructions, which are another of the most common problems with this type of waste.

"On the other hand, the abundance of floating plastic fragments allows many small organisms to sail on them and colonize places they could not access to previously. But probably, most of the impacts taking place due to plastic pollution in the oceans are not yet known"....

A plastic bag looking like a jellyfish, shot by seegraswiese, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

The simpler, the more heat-resistant – scientists uncover the key to adaptation limits of ocean dwellers

A press release from the Alfred Wegener Institut: The simpler a marine organism is structured, the better it is suited for survival during climate change. Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, discovered this in a new meta-study, which appears today in the research journal Global Change Biology. For the first time biologists studied the relationship between the complexity of life forms and the ultimate limits of their adaptation to a warmer climate. While unicellular bacteria and archaea are able to live even in hot, oxygen-deficient water, marine creatures with a more complex structure, such as animals and plants, reach their growth limits at a water temperature of 41 degrees Celsius. This temperature threshold seems to be insurmountable for their highly developed metabolic systems.

The current IPCC Assessment Report shows that marine life forms respond very differently to the increasing water temperature and the decreasing oxygen content of the ocean. “We now asked ourselves why this is so....

Since years Storch and her colleagues have been investigating the processes that result in animals having a certain temperature threshold up to which they can develop and reproduce. The scientists found that the reason for this is their cardiovascular system. They were able to show in laboratory experiments that this transport system is the first to fail in warmer water. Blood circulation supplies all cells and organs of a living organism with oxygen, but can only do so up to a certain maximum temperature. Beyond this threshold, the transport capacity of this system is no longer sufficient; the animal can then only sustain performance for a short time. Based on this, the biologists had suspected at an early date that there is a relationship between the complex structure of an organism and its limited ability to continue to function in increasingly warm water.

“In our study, therefore, we examined the hypothesis that the complexity could be the key that determines the ultimate adaptability of diverse life forms, from marine archaea to animals, to different living conditions in the course of evolutionary history. That means: the simpler the structure of an organism, the more resistant it should be,” explains the biologist. ...

...The new research results also provide evidence that the body size of an organism plays a decisive role concerning adaptation limits. Smaller animal species or smaller individuals of an animal species can survive at lower oxygen concentration levels and higher temperatures than the larger animals....

Graphic from the Alfred Wegener Institute website

Kenya's swelling lakes disrupt class, push crocodiles into town

Caleb Kemboi at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: At Salabani primary school on the shores of Lake Baringo in western Kenya, teacher Rehema Lewer holds a Swahili lesson under an acacia tree. But the students aren’t outside to enjoy the fresh air - they have been forced by the lake's rising waters to leave their school and move to higher ground.

Over the past two years, Kenya's Rift Valley lakes - the freshwater Lake Baringo and saltwater Lake Bogoria - have experienced unprecedented increases in their water levels, resulting in calamitous flooding that has inundated entire villages. After the latest heavy rainfall in April, the swollen lakes cut off three health centres, several tourist lodges and 10 schools, including Salabani.

"Teaching under the trees is safer," said teacher Lewer. "But it is marred by a lot of challenges." Those include crocodiles.

As the water's edge creeps closer to villages, crocodiles swim further up onto what was once dry land. They can be seen crawling through village streets, and napping outside people's front doors. One resident said crocodiles had eaten her only two goats, while a fisherman said he and his team had already survived several attacks as they tried to work on the lake shore.

"Pupils who come from a distance have to use canoes to reach their schools, so they are prone to crocodile attacks," said Lewer. "This makes it difficult for them to attend classes daily."...

A croc on the banks of the Mara River in Kenya, shot by Lip Kee, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Montana snowshoe hare study provides documentation of climate-change adaptation

Martin Kidston in the Missoulian (Montana): In the biting cold and snow-filled backcountry of the Seeley-Swan Valley, researchers from the University of Montana are looking for what should be nearly invisible. After all, snowshoe hares against a winter landscape shouldn’t be easy to spot, their camouflaged coat a point of remarkable adaptation.

Yet as the climate warms and the snow comes later and melts sooner, the white hare often finds itself out of sync with its surroundings. Whether the animal can adapt to the changes remains uncertain, and success or failure may implicate the future of the threatened Canada lynx.

“There’s no more specialized mammal species on Earth as Canada lynx are with hares,” sai
d former UM researcher Scott Mills. “There’s no way you can recover lynx without fostering strong hare populations.”

Now at North Carolina State University, Mills has studied hares for 15 years and counting. Aided by UM graduate students working from Montana, he and his team have compiled the nation’s largest body of field data on snowshoe hares.

Over the years, the work has ranged from the timing of the hares’ changing coat color to climate change and the impacts of pre-commercial thinning on forest habitat. Their findings appeared last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and, two weeks ago, the National Science Foundation moved to fund the study for five additional years at a cost of $400,000.

“The NSF recognizes this as one of the most important long-term studies of a forest species in the U.S.,” said Mills. “They like the fact that we’re working to understand the basic principles that drive population dynamics, and that we’re applying that in a number of ways, from recovering the Canada lynx to better forestry practices to understanding climate change.”...

A snowshoe hare, shot by Denali National Park and Preserve, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Carbon models underestimate role of animals

A press release from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies: Animal populations can have a far more significant effect on carbon storage and exchange in regional ecosystems than is typically recognized by global carbon models, according to a new paper authored by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES).

In fact, in some regions the magnitude of carbon uptake or release due to the effects of specific animal species or groups of animals — such as the pine beetles devouring forests in western North America — can rival the impact of fossil fuel emissions for the same region, according to the paper published in the journal Ecosystems.

While models typically take into account how plants and microbes affect the carbon cycle, they often underestimate how much animals can indirectly alter the absorption, release, or transport of carbon within an ecosystem, says Oswald J. Schmitz, the Oastler Professor of Population and Community Ecology at F&ES and lead author of the paper. Historically, the role of animals has been largely underplayed since animal species are not distributed globally and because the total biomass of animals is vastly lower than the plants that they rely upon, and therefore contribute little carbon in the way of respiration.

“What these sorts of analyses have not paid attention to is what we call the indirect multiplier effects,” Schmitz says. “And these indirect effects can be quite huge – and disproportionate to the biomass of the species that are instigating the change.”

In the paper, “Animating the Carbon Cycle,” a team of 15 authors from 12 universities, research organizations and government agencies cites numerous cases where animals have triggered profound impacts on the carbon cycle at local and regional levels.

...“We hope this article will inspire scientists and managers to include animals when thinking of local and regional carbon budgets,” said Peter A. Raymond, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies....

Roelant Savery, "Herds in the Ruins," 1617

Are banana farms contaminating Costa Rica's crocodiles?

Seed Daily via SPX: Shoppers spend over Pounds 10 billion on bananas annually and now this demand is being linked to the contamination of Central America's crocodilians. New research, published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, analyses blood samples from spectacled caiman in Costa Rica and finds that intensive pesticide use in plantations leads to contaminated species in protected conservation areas.

"Banana plantations are big business in Costa Rica, which exports an estimated 1.8 million tonnes per year; 10% of the global total," said author Paul Grant from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. "The climate of the country's North East is ideal for bananas; however, the Rio Suerte, which flows through this major banana producing area, drains into the Tortuguero Conservation Area."

Tortuguero is home to the spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus), one of the most common species of crocodilian in Central America. This freshwater predator is known to be highly adaptive, feeding on fish, crustaceans and in the case of larger specimens, wild pigs.

Due to the increased global demand for fruit, pesticide use has more than doubled across Central America in the past twenty years. In Costa Rica, which ranks second in the world for intensity of pesticide use, the problem of contamination is compounded by environmental conditions and lax enforcement of regulations.

"Frequent heavy rains can wash pesticides from plantation areas, leading to contamination and the reapplication of sprays to the crops," said Grant. "Without adequate enforcement of regulations dangerous practices such as aerial spraying close to streams or washing application equipment in rivers also contributes to contamination downstream."...

A spectacled caiman, from the BioTrek California website, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Movement of marine life follows speed and direction of climate change

A press release from Princeton University: Scientists expect climate change and warmer oceans to push the fish that people rely on for food and income into new territory. Predictions of where and when species will relocate, however, are based on broad expectations about how animals will move and have often not played out in nature. New research based at Princeton University shows that the trick to more precise forecasts is to follow local temperature changes.

The researchers report in the journal Science the first evidence that sea creatures consistently keep pace with "climate velocity," or the speed and direction in which changes such as ocean temperature move. They compiled 43 years of data related to the movement of 128 million animals from 360 species living around North America, including commercial staples such as lobster, shrimp and cod. They found that 70 percent of shifts in animals' depth and 74 percent of changes in latitude correlated with regional-scale fluctuations in ocean temperature.

New research based at Princeton University shows that the trick to predicting when and where sea animals will relocate due to climate change is to follow the pace and direction of temperature changes, known as climate velocity. The researchers compiled 43 years of survey data on the movement of 128 million animals living around North America. Shifts in the animals' depth and latitude correlated with regional-scale fluctuations in ocean temperature. On average, changes in temperature moved north at 4.5 miles per decade and species shifted an average of 5 miles north per decade. But species-specific movements varied greatly. For example, lobster in the northeastern United States (above) moved north at a pace of 43 miles per decade. Nearly half of all species studied moved south...

"If we follow the temperature, which is easier to predict, that provides a method to predict where the species will be, too," said first author Malin Pinsky, a former Princeton postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology who is now an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at Rutgers University....

The researchers found a "complex mosaic" of climate velocity and species movement in nine areas central to North American fishing industries (above from left to right): the Aleutian Islands (light blue); the eastern Bering Sea (blue); the Gulf of Alaska (light green); the West Coast (purple); the Gulf Coast (orange); the Northeast (peach); Nova Scotia (pink); the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence (red); and Newfoundland (green). The insets (image A) show shifts in the maximum (blue), average (black) and minimum (red) latitude during the period studied for Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska, big skate on the West Coast and American lobster in the Northeast. The close-ups of the Eastern Bering Sea (B), the Gulf Coast (C) and Newfoundland (D) show the nuances of regional animal movements that global-scale models often miss. (Image by Science/AAAS)

Insight into marine life's ability to adapt to climate change

EurekAlert via the University of Plymouth: A study into marine life around an underwater volcanic vent in the Mediterranean, might hold the key to understanding how some species will be able to survive in increasingly acidic sea water should anthropogenic climate change continue.

Researchers have discovered that some species of polychaete worms are able to modify their metabolic rates to better cope with and thrive in waters high in carbon dioxide (CO2), which is otherwise poisonous to other, often closely-related species. The study sheds new light on the robustness of some marine species and the relative resilience of marine biodiversity should atmospheric CO2 continue to cause ocean acidification.

A team of scientists led by Plymouth University, and including colleagues from the Naples Zoological Station in Ischia; the Marine Ecology Laboratory ENEA in La Spezia, Italy; the University of Texas Galveston; and the University of Hull, conducted a three-year research project into the potential mechanisms that species of worm polychaetes use to live around the underwater CO2 vent of Ischia in Southern Italy.

...They monitored the responses of the worms and found that one of the species that had been living inside the CO2 vent was physiologically and genetically adapted to the acidic conditions, whilst another was able to survive inside the vent by adjusting its metabolism.

...The results revealed that species normally found inside the CO2 vent were better able to regulate their metabolic rate when exposed to high CO2 conditions, whilst species only found outside the CO2 vent were clearly impaired by acidic waters. In fact, their metabolism either greatly decreased, indicating reduced energy production, or greatly increased, indicating a surge in the basic cost of living, in both cases making life inside the vent unsustainable.

Dr Maria-Cristina Gambi, of the Naples Zoological Station in Ischia, explained: "Despite some species showing the ability to metabolically adapt and adjust to the extreme conditions that are found inside the CO2 vents, others appear unable to physiologically cope with such conditions. In this sense, our findings could help to explain mass extinctions of the past, and potential extinctions in the future, as well as shed light on the resilience of some species to on-going ocean acidification."...

Sully Vent in the Main Endeavour Vent Field of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. Shot by NOAA, public domain

Big animals crucial for soil fertility

Seed Daily: The mass extinction of large animals in the Pleistocene era caused today's dearth of soil nutrients, scientists said Sunday, and warned of further damage if modern giants like the elephant disappear.

The Pleistocene epoch, which dated from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago, saw large animals dubbed megafauna take over domination of the planet from extinct dinosaurs, only to die out en masse themselves.

During their peak, much of the world resembled a modern-day African savannah. South America, for example, was teeming with five-tonne ground sloths, armadillo-like glyptodonts the size of a small car, and herds of elephant-like cuvieronius and stegomastodonts.

These megafauna, animals weighing more than 44 kilograms (97 pounds), played a key role in fertilising soil far away from the areas near rivers where they fed -- ploughing the nutrients they consumed back into circulation through their dung or their decomposing bodies when they died.

Large animals ate much more and travelled further than small ones, and were mainly responsible for long-distance fertilisation, said a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience....

Comparison of the dog-sized weasel Ekorus ekakeran, of what is now Kenya, with the jackal-sized civet, Viverra leakeyi, of what is now South Africa. From the Late Miocene of Africa (C) Stanton F. Fink. Uploaded by Apokryltaros, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Climate change is happening too quickly for species to adapt

Robin McKie in the Guardian (UK): Among the many strange mantras repeated by climate change deniers is the claim that even in an overheated, climate-altered planet, animals and plants will still survive by adapting to global warming. Corals, trees, birds, mammals and butterflies are already changing to the routine reality of global warming, it is argued.

Certainly, countless species have adapted to past climate fluctuations. However, their rate of change turns out to be painfully slow, according to a study by Professor John Wiens of the University of Arizona. Using data from 540 living species, including amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, Wiens and colleagues compared their rates of evolution with the rates of climate change projected for the end of this century. The results, published online in the journal Ecology Letters, show that most land animals will not be able to evolve quickly enough to adapt to the dramatically warmer climate expected by 2100. Many species face extinction, as a result.

"We found that, on average, species usually adapt to different climatic conditions at a rate of only by about 1C per million years," Wiens explained. "But if global temperatures are going to rise by about four degrees over the next 100 years as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that is where you get a huge difference in rates. What that suggests overall is that simply evolving to match these conditions may not be an option for many species."

The study indicates there is simply not enough time for species to change their morphologies – for example, by altering their bodies' shapes so they hold less heat – to compensate for rising heat levels. Too many generations of evolutionary change are required. Nor is moving habitat an option for many creatures. "Consider a species living on the top of a mountain," says Wiens. "If it gets too warm or dry up there, they can't go anywhere."...

A snow leopard, shot by Irbis1983, public domain 

Decline in biodiversity of farmed plants, animals gathering pace

Alister Doyle in Reuters: A decline in the diversity of farmed plants and livestock breeds is gathering pace, threatening future food supplies for the world's growing population, the head of a new United Nations panel on biodiversity said on Monday.

Preserving neglected animal breeds and plants was necessary as they could have genes resistant to future diseases or to shifts in the climate to warmer temperatures, more droughts or downpours, Zakri Abdul Hamid said.

"The loss of biodiversity is happening faster and everywhere, even among farm animals," Zakri told a conference of 450 experts in Trondheim, central Norway, in his first speech as founding chair of the U.N. biodiversity panel.

Many traditional breeds of cows, sheep or goats have fallen out of favor, often because they yield less meat or milk than new breeds. Globalization also means that people's food preferences narrow down to fewer plants.

Zakri said there were 30,000 edible plants but that just 30 crops accounted for 95 percent of the energy in human food that is dominated by rice, wheat, maize, millet and sorghum.

He said it was "more important than ever to have a large genetic pool to enable organisms to withstand and adapt to new conditions." That would help to ensure food for a global population set to reach 9 billion by 2050 from 7 billion now....

Artwork of a bull on an antique steam-powered tractor at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm. Image from Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, Wikimedia Commons

One-third of animal species will be hit by climate change, scientists warn

The Guardian (UK): One-third of common land animals could see dramatic losses this century because of climate change, scientists predict. More than half of plants could be hit the same way as habitats become unsuitable for numerous species. The collapse of ecosystems would have major economic impacts on agriculture, air quality, clean water access, and tourism.

Global temperatures are set to rise 4C above preindustrial levels by 2100 if nothing is done to stem greenhouse gas emissions. This could have a hugely destructive effect on thousands of common as well as rare and endangered species around the world, according to the researchers.

An estimated 57% of plants and 34% of animals were likely to lose half or more of their habitat range. But the damage would be greatly reduced if emissions were scaled down in time, the study shows. Losses are reduced by 60% if global warming is cut to 2% above preindustrial levels, with emissions peaking in 2016 and then being reduced by 5% a year. If emissions peak in 2030, losses are reduced by 40%.

Lead scientist Dr Rachel Warren, from the University of East Anglia's school of environmental science, said: "While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species....

A tree frog in Portland, Oregon, shot by CopyrightFreePhotos.HQ101.com, who has generously released the image into the public domain

Decline in snow cover spells trouble for many plants, animals

University of Wisconsin-Madison News: For plants and animals forced to tough out harsh winter weather, the coverlet of snow that blankets the north country is a refuge, a stable beneath-the-snow habitat that gives essential respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures.

But in a warming world, winter and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere is in decline, putting at risk many plants and animals that depend on the space beneath the snow to survive the blustery chill of winter.

In a report published May 2 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes the gradual decay of the Northern Hemisphere's "subnivium," the term scientists use to describe the seasonal microenvironment beneath the snow, a habitat where life from microbes to bears take full advantage of warmer temperatures, near constant humidity and the absence of wind.

"Underneath that homogenous blanket of snow is an incredibly stable refuge where the vast majority of organisms persist through the winter," explains Jonathan Pauli, a UW-Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology and a co-author of the new report. "The snow holds in heat radiating from the ground, plants photosynthesize, and it's a haven for insects, reptiles, amphibians and many other organisms."

Since 1970, snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere — the part of the world that contains the largest land masses affected by snow — has diminished by as much as 3.2 million square kilometers during the critical spring months of March and April. Maximum snow cover has shifted from February to January and spring melt has accelerated by almost two weeks, according to Pauli and his colleagues, Benjamin Zuckerberg and Warren Porter, also of UW-Madison, and John P. Whiteman of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

"The winter ecology of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest is changing," says Zuckerberg, a UW-Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology. "There is concern these winter ecosystems could change dramatically over the next several years."...

A brown wood frog can survive happily under the snow. Shot by Thomas Brown, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Environmental change triggers rapid evolution

University of Leeds Research and Innovation News: A University of Leeds-led study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, overturns the common assumption that evolution only occurs gradually over hundreds or thousands of years.

Instead, researchers found significant genetically transmitted changes in laboratory populations of soil mites in just 15 generations, leading to a doubling of the age at which the mites reached adulthood and large changes in population size. The results have important implications in areas such as disease and pest control, conservation and fisheries management because they demonstrate that evolution can be a game-changer even in the short-term.

Professor Tim Benton, of the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences, said:  “This demonstrates that short-term ecological change and evolution are completely intertwined and cannot reasonably be considered separate. We found that populations evolve rapidly in response to environmental change and population management. This can have major consequences such as reducing harvesting yields or saving a population heading for extinction.”

Although previous research has implied a link between short-term changes in animal species’ physical characteristics and evolution, the Leeds-led study is the first to prove a causal relationship between rapid genetic evolution and animal population dynamics in a controlled experimental setting.

The researchers worked with soil mites that were collected from the wild and then raised in 18 glass tubes. Forty percent of adult mites were removed every week from six of the glass tubes. A similar proportion of juveniles were removed each week in a further six tubes, while no “harvesting” was conducted in the remaining third of the tubes.

Lead author Dr Tom Cameron, a postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at Leeds at the time of the research and now based in Umeå University, Sweden, said: “We saw significant evolutionary changes relatively quickly. The age of maturity of the mites in the tubes doubled over about 15 generations, because they were competing in a different way than they would in the wild. Removing the adults caused them to remain as juveniles even longer because the genetics were responding to the high chance that they were going to die as soon as they matured. When they did eventually mature, they were so enormous they could lay all of their eggs very quickly.”...

A giant red velvet mite, shot by Ton Rulkens, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Nature adapts to survive climate change

Jonathan Silver in Reuters: While the climate change discussion in Washington is moving at a glacial pace, nature is responding to climate change at record speed. The animal, plant and insect kingdoms aren’t interested in public policy. They don’t read political blogs. They adapt because they have to. They must change to survive. We would be wise to heed the signs.

Animals, plants and even insects are now adapting quickly to shifts in temperatures, often by migrating to cooler climates, modifying their diets and altering breeding cycles.

This is happening at blinding speed in large, complex ecosystems. Throughout most of the 20th century, for example, tree range shift occurred at about 0.4 miles a year. Since 1990, however, climate changes have caused species range to move by an average of 12 miles a year. A 2009 U.S. Forest Service study, tracking 40 major tree species in 30 Eastern states, concluded that tree ranges had moved, on average, more than 60 miles north in less than a century.

More than 60 percent of the birds the National Wildlife Federation tracked in a recent study have expanded their range northward by an average of 35 miles in the last 40 years. Fourteen small mammal species in the Sierra Nevada Mountains were found to have extended the elevation at which they can survive by an average of 1,640 feet.

...The climate may now be changing so quickly that some species do not have time to adapt. With the Antarctic warming, for example, penguins now need to lay their eggs far earlier, according to research at Stony Brook University in New York. Yet of the three species studied – the Adelie, Chinstrap and Gentoo – only the Gentoo has been able to adapt quickly. As a result, that population has exploded, while the other two are dwindling....

A gentoo penguin in Antarctica, shot by christopher, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Lizards facing mass extinction

University of Lincoln: Climate change could lead to dozens of lizard species becoming extinct within the next 50 years, according to new research published this week. Globally it has been observed that lizards with viviparous reproduction (retention of embryos within the mother’s body) are being threatened by changing weather patterns. A new study suggests that the evolution of this mode of reproduction, which is thought to be a key successful adaptation, could, in fact, be the species’ downfall under global warming.

Dr Daniel Pincheira-Donoso, from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln (UK), is the lead author of the paper detailing these amazing predictions, published in the scientific journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.

Researchers, including academics from the University of Exeter, investigated the hypothesis that historical invasions of cold climates by Liolaemus lizards – one of the most diverse groups of vertebrates on earth – have only been possible due to their evolution to viviparity (live birth) from oviparity (laying eggs). Remarkably, once these species evolve viviparity, the process is mostly irreversible and they remain restricted to colder climates.

By analysing this evolutionary transition in the lizards’ reproductive modes and projecting the future impact of climate change, the scientists discovered that increasing temperatures in the species’ historically cold habitats would result in their areas of distribution being significantly reduced. As a consequence, if global warming continues at the same rate, viviparous lizards are facing extinction in the next few decades....

A lizard shot by Scott Wylie, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

As predators decline, carbon emissions rise

Space Daily via SPX: University of British Columbia researchers have found that when the animals at the top of the food chain are removed, freshwater ecosystems emit a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

"Predators are disappearing from our ecosystems at alarming rates because of hunting and fishing pressure and because of human induced changes to their habitats," says Trisha Atwood, a PhD candidate in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC.

For their study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Atwood and her colleagues wanted to measure the role predators play in regulating carbon emissions to better understand the consequences of losing these animals.

Predators are bigger animals at the top of the food chain and their diets are comprised of all the smaller animals and plants in the ecosystem, either directly or indirectly. As a result, the number of predators in an ecosystem regulates the numbers of all the plants and animals lower in the food chain. It's these smaller animals and plants that play a big role in sequestering or emitting carbon.

When Atwood and her colleagues removed all the predators from three controlled freshwater ecosystems, 93 per cent more carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere...

A mountain lion in West Virginia, shot by ForestWander, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license