By Graham Cook
End result on land will be animals that have never lived together before coming into close contact with each other
New information about how land and sea animals react to climate change has come to light, thanks to a joint effort by researchers at Simon Fraser University and the University of Tasmania. Their study, which was started two to three years ago, has shown not only that animals are moving about the globe, but why they are doing so.
The lead author of this study, Jennifer Sunday, discussed the team’s findings with The Peak. She said that the work began with looking at “data from . . . studies where they looked at heat and cold tolerance of [a variety of animals].” This, she said, was especially arduous, as there are many years worth of information on this topic. That data set was published in 2010, and now the task is to find the specific latitudinal limits of different animals.
She explained that this research was started because “it’s really important to know where animals are going to be distributed.” According to Sunday, the most popular approach is to take climate models and all the animal distributions and predict where they are going to be. However, she feels that there is “a long history of the study of ecology that needs to be used when trying to make predictions about the future.” She stated, “Because animals are not chemicals, you cannot [predict their actions] that easily just based on temperature.” Her position is that researchers need to take into account how the organisms interact with their environment and each other. The results of the study show that some ecological factors are essential to take into account when looking at matters such as this.
The main conclusion of this study is that animals are moving and that in the ocean the shifts are “more cohesive,” with whole ecosystems moving, whereas on land there will be more reshuffling. Sunday said that the end result on land will be animals that have never lived together before coming into close contact with each other. She called these phenomena “ecological surprises.”
Sunday concluded by sharing that Charles Darwin had predicted what they found on land. While terrestrial animals are limited to the north by the cold, their southern limitations are defined by competition and other ecological factors rather than heat. Similar results were not found in the ocean.
