• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022 January 31, 2023
Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB January 31, 2023
Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty January 31, 2023
Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds January 31, 2023
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Next
Prev

Common insects face growing problems

February 15, 2018
Reading time: 4 minutes
Primary Author: Tim Radford

 

The Earth’s largest animal group faces a new threat. Insects – not just rare species, but common insects too – may become less genetically diverse.

LONDON, 15 February, 2018 – Revelations that insect species are in trouble are not new. But now comes news that the problem may be much more widespread. Even common insects in Germany could be at risk.

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
New!
Subscribe

Wildlife biologists are prepared for the disappearance of rare species – which may have adapted to exploit precarious environments – but the news that species always considered widespread if not ubiquitous are also in jeopardy is troubling.

The news follows a revelation from a German research team late last year that the sheer mass of flying insects had declined by as much as 75% in the last three decades, once again in Germany.

And although the researchers don’t blame global warming – habitat destruction and changes in land use are enough to explain much of the disappearance – the steady rise in temperatures is seen as the only explanation for a separate finding: beetles in British Columbia have dwindled in size as the thermometer has crept up.

Likely replication

Each study is concerned with one geographical region. Human pressure and changing agricultural practice is much the same across the entire developed world, and global warming is just that: global.

So there is a likelihood that other research teams will find much the same evidence in other places. Insects matter: they represent the largest animal group on Earth; they feed on insect pests, they are themselves food for birds; and they pollinate plants, both wild and farmed, and entomologists have been watching their response to change.

Two German scientists report in the journal Conservation Biology
that they believe the genetic diversity even of frequently-observed butterfly species could decline sharply in future. And because this diversity is the source of species’ resilience to change, their studied animals could then become even more sensitive to environmental shifts.

“Until now, we assumed that it is primarily the specialists among the insects, i.e., animals that depend on a specific habitat, that are threatened with extinction,” said Thomas Schmitt, director of the Senckenberg German Entomological Institute in Müncheberg.

Diversity loss

“In our recent study, we were able to show that even so-called ‘ubiquitous species’ will be facing massive threats in the future.”

And his co-author Jan Christan Habel of the Technical University of Munich said that widespread species carried a much more diverse “gene pool” than those adapted to one confined ecosystem.

“Once these animals – due to the fragmentation of their habitats – lose the opportunity to maintain this genetic diversity by means of exchange, they will no longer be able to adapt to the changing environmental conditions of the future.”

European scientists have been watching insect populations for decades: they have measured butterfly loss in response to the kind of weather extremes likely to accompany climate change; they have even observed a shift in insect colour patterns with the longer summers.

“We were able to show that even so-called ‘ubiquitous species’ will be facing massive threats in the future”

They expect some species to benefit from change while others may lose out, but they have also repeatedly warned that climate change puts entire ecosystems in peril.

Zoologists have known for a century of a link between temperature and body size: animals in colder climates gain an advantage from being big. Those that need to lose body heat gain from being smaller.

But students and museum curators in Canada may be among the first to identify a shift in body-size in insects as a response to recent climate change.

They report in the Journal of Animal Ecology that they selected eight species of beetle from two sites in British Columbia and photographed more than 6500 individual specimens caught over the last century and preserved in a natural history collection.

Shrinking beetles

They also reared 22 species of beetles in laboratory conditions over a range of autumn temperatures that matched the changes recorded in those sites. One of them, Okanagan, has seen a 2.25°C increase in the last 45 years. And in those 45 years, the four largest beetles had dwindled by 20% in average size.

“This research provides evidence that climate change is affecting even the smallest organisms out there,” said Michelle Tseng, a botanist and zoologist at the University of British Columbia.

“When these organisms were collected, I don’t think anyone ever thought that they were collecting them so we could monitor how they are changing. Museum collections contain more biodiversity now than will ever be collected again.

“It’s incredible that the diversity of collections in museums can help us understand and predict how organisms might change in the future.” – Climate News Network



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
43
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
26
Western Arctic National Parklands/wikimedia commons
Arctic & Antarctica

Arctic Wildfires Show Approach of New Climate Feedback Loop

January 2, 2023
28

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Mike Mozart/Flickr

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

January 31, 2023
313
Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
191
Doc Searls/Twitter

Guilbeault Could Intervene on Ontario Greenbelt Development

January 31, 2023
125
Ken Teegardin www.SeniorLiving.Org/flickr

Virtual Power Plants Hit an ‘Inflection Point’

January 31, 2023
115
RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2.4k
/snappy goat

Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds

January 31, 2023
92

Recent Posts

CONFENIAE

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
58
Victorgrigas/wikimedia commons

World Bank Climate Reforms Too ‘Timid and Slow,’ Critics Warn

January 31, 2023
41
United Nations

Salvage of $20B ‘Floating Time Bomb’ Delayed by Rising Cost of Oil Tankers

January 27, 2023
120
@tongbingxue/Twitter

Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’

January 23, 2023
340
Rachel Notley/Facebook

Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom

January 23, 2023
312
EcoAnalytics

Albertans Want a Just Transition, Despite Premier’s Grumbling

January 23, 2023
321
Next Post

Australian Tourist Industry Unprepared for Climate Disruption

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}