Study on butterfly adaptation to climate change
From MSNBC:
How butterflies adapt when climate change: Some take to forests to shade themselves from heat, but not enough to save populations
As climate changes, some butterflies take to the forests to shade themselves from the heat, new research suggest. However, not a large enough number of butterflies are making the move to save their populations, the researchers also found.
"A lot of the butterflies we were looking at are threatened by climate change. With the warmer temperatures, it will be too hot for a lot of them to survive in southern Europe," study researcher Andrew Suggitt, a graduate student at the University of York in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience.....(read rest of the story)
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This story comes from the peer-reviewed article:
Suggitt, A. J., C. et al. 2012. Habitat associations of species show consistent but weak responses to climate. Biology Letters. Pre-print release.
Journal abstract: Different vegetation types can generate variation in microclimates at local scales, potentially buffering species from adverse climates. To determine if species could respond to such microclimates under climatic warming, we evaluated whether ectothermic species (butterflies) can exploit favourable microclimates and alter their use of different habitats in response to year-to-year variation in climate. In both relatively cold (Britain) and warm (Catalonia) regions of their geographical ranges, most species shifted into cooler, closed habitats (e.g. woodland) in hot years, and into warmer, open habitats (e.g. grassland) in cooler years. Additionally, three-quarters of species occurred in closed habitats more frequently in the warm region than in the cool region. Thus, species shift their local distributions and alter their habitat associations to exploit favourable microclimates, although the magnitude of the shift (approx. 1.3% of individuals from open to shade, per degree Celsius) is unlikely to buffer species from impacts of regional climate warming.
Posted by Charles Chester on Tuesday, April 10, 20125:31PM
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