Climate Change

Question 1

What are the possible effects of climate change have on animals?

Answer 1

• Move (distributional changes)
• Change behaviour (microclimates, breeding cycles, etc. )
• Adapt to changes

Question 2

What are the 3 main threatened habitats?

Answer 2

• Montane & alpine communities
• Arctic & Antarctic communities
• Coastal communities

Question 3

What type of species are most vulnerable to climate change?

Answer 3

• Peripheral populations on edge of their range
• Geographically localised species with limited endemic ranges
• Highly specialised species, e.g. Snail kite
  (Rostrhamus sociabilis) feeds only on
  Pomacea snails in Florida Wetlands)
• Species with poor dispersal abilities (some some
  tropical forest birds will not cross even
  barren clearings)

Question 4

What are the 3 potential scenarios to distributional changes?

Answer 4

• Shifts in species’ latitudinal and/or altitudinal distributions
• Range expansion/contraction
• Extinction

Question 5

Give an example of an animal that has shifted their distributions in the last 25 years

Answer 5

15 species of North Sea fish have shifted their distributions to cooler latitudes & 6 have moved to lower depths in response to a 0.6°C rise in temp

Question 6

Give an example of a species that have had a change in status

Answer 6

Golden toads from 1000s of breeding pairs to nearly none in Costa Rica in 1991, immediately after drop in rainfall

Question 7

Give an example of an animal that have experienced a change in phenology

Answer 7

• Many reptiles show temperature-dependent
  sex determination (TSD)
• Warming can affect population sex ratio with
  serious consequences
• E.g. in Florida, loggerhead sea turtles may be responding to the female sex bias caused by increasing temperature by nesting on average 10 days earlier

Question 8

N. American Tree Swallows

Answer 8

Average egg laying date has moved forward 9 days
Could be due to:
- Higher temperatures allowing more energy
to be spent on developing eggs
- Shorter breeding season
- Breeding season moved forward to match
advanced phenology of plants and insects

Question 9

What can a change in breeding cycles lead to?

Answer 9

• Changes in intra/inter-species competition
• Changes in predator-prey interactions
• Parasitic infections
• Decoupling of mutualisms
• Mismatch of resources to requirements.

Question 10

What is physiological flexibility?

Answer 10

Rapid, reversible changes in individual phenotypes that reflect flexible responses to changing environments.
These responses can include altering their
metabolic rate, and even altering organ size to
adjust to new energy demands.

Question 11

Give an example of an animal that show short-term phenotypic flexibility

Answer 11

Five closely related species of lark