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Brave new world: Simple changes in intensity of weather events 'could be lethal'
Faced with unprecedented change, animals and plants are scrambling to catch up -- with mixed results. A new model developed by Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Thomas Haaland, formerly a graduate student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, helps to predict the types of changes that could drive a given species to extinction.
The study, published Sept. 27 in the journal Ecology and Evolution, challenges the idea that species previously exposed to more variable conditions are more likely to survive extreme events.
"It is difficult to predict how organisms will respond to changes in extreme events because these events tend to be, by definition, quite rare," Botero said. "But we can have a pretty good idea of how any given species may respond to current changes in this aspect of climate -- if we pay attention to its natural history, and have some idea of the climatic regime it has experienced in the past."
[...]Researchers in the Botero laboratory use a variety of tools from ecology and evolutionary biology to explore how life -- from bacteria to humans -- copes with and adapts to repeated environmental change.
For the new study, Botero worked with his former student Haaland, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, to develop an evolutionary model of how populations respond to rare environmental extremes. (Think: 500-year floods.) These rare events can be tricky for evolution because it is difficult to adapt to hazards that are almost never encountered.
Through computer simulations, Haaland and Botero found that certain traits and experiences emerged as key indicators of vulnerability.
Specifically, they found:
- Species that breed a single time in their lifetime tend to evolve conservative behaviors or morphologies, as if they were expecting to experience an environmental extreme every time.
- In contrast, species in which a single individual can reproduce multiple times and in different contexts (say, a bird that nests several times in a season and in different trees), evolution favors behaving as if environmental extremes simply never happen.
The key insight of this new model is that species belonging to the former, "conservative" category can easily adapt to more frequent or widespread extremes but have trouble adjusting when those extremes become more intense. The opposite is true of species in the latter, "care-free" category.
Journal Reference: Ecology and Evolution, 2019; DOI: 10.1002/ece3.5675
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @10:43PM (3 children)
Stupid clickbait headline... I was hoping to read how many pakis were going to drown.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @11:16PM
None. Many New Yorkers, thought, but not enough SoCalites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
You do realize you're a twisted fuck right? Like "no place in society" kind of twisted. Should be locked up for their safety and others'.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @01:26AM
Looks like a snowflake got triggered. Head to your safe space, little snowflake, it'll be OK.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday October 02 2019, @10:56PM (1 child)
unfortunately, this model is unlikely to extrapolate to countries..
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday October 02 2019, @11:24PM
Yeah, after getting that Christmas is a summer holiday through my northern-hemispherian skull, things like "Meh, a balmy 42C today. Tommorow will be slightly warmer, around 48C" weren't that hard to accept.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @02:12AM
It caused death in every organism studied.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Thursday October 03 2019, @10:37AM (2 children)
You should have sex with lots of people and spawn lots of kids without commitment. I mean, science says so! ;-)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 03 2019, @06:48PM (1 child)
Actually, judging from the summary, your best bet would be a mixed strategy: Spawn lots of kids without commitment, and additionally a few you are fully committed to.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Friday October 04 2019, @01:04PM
Very good point. Isn't that what royalty used to do?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 03 2019, @12:51PM
to someone or something.
Washington DC delenda est.