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    Home > Food News > Food Articles > Science: Will global warming make animals darker or lighter?

    Science: Will global warming make animals darker or lighter?

    • Last Update: 2021-01-13
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    warming has increasingly affected the natural ecology, how will it affect the evolution of animals? Recently, Science reported on the latest debate around the subject: As the climate warms, will animals become darker or lighter in color?
    debate about how warming will change animals is not really a new topic, and in the 19th century people began to think about it. At the time, biologists discovered a variety of "rules" that describe the ecological and evolutionary effects of temperature. One rule is that in hot climates, animals have larger appendages, such as ears, moths, etc., which make it easier to dissipate heat.
    another theory is that in any animal group, the largest animals usually live close to the polar world because larger bodies help preserve heat. Polar bears, for example, are much larger than brown bears living in mid-latitudes.
    is known as the "Gloger's Rule" and is named after the German biologist Constantine Grogg. This rule is summed up as: animals living in warm areas have darker appearances, while animals living in cold areas have lighter appearances.
    in mammals, dark skin and hair are thought to protect them from UV rays. Ultraviolet rays are most pronounced in sunny equatorial areas. In birds, the special melanin in dark feathers also appears to be resistant to bacteria, which is also an advantage in the tropics.
    Dr. Tian Li of the National Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology at the University of Geology of China (Wuhan) and Professor Michael Benton of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom have renewed their interest in this ancient law, and in July 2020 The Current Biology, a journal of the Cell Publishing Group, published an online paper, "Predicting The Biotic response to climate change using classical ecological laws." The paper introduces and summarizes seven biological laws named after discoverers from Darwinian times to the late last century, which summarize the important correlation between bio-ecology/distribution and geographical climate sub-regions. Based on these classical theories, the authors make the following seven specific predictions for the continued warming of the future climate:
    1, birds and mammals will have a longer limb ratio;
    2, plants, marine invertebrates, birds and mammals will become smaller in size;
    3, insects, birds and mammals will have a deeper body color;
    4, the proportion of the heart and lungs of mammals will be smaller;
    5, fish will have smaller spines;
    6, plants, marine invertebrates, insects, birds and mammals may have smaller species distribution, biodiversity peak areas will drift to two levels;
    , fish, insects and marine invertebrates will produce more, smaller eggs, more marine benthic organisms will reproduce. The paper writes that the average global temperature has risen by more than 1 degree since the Industrial Revolution, and the International Climate Organization predicts that it could continue to rise by 1-5 degrees Celsius by 2100. A variety of surface disasters in modern times, including floods/droughts, hurricanes, frequent air pollution and plagues, reduced species diversity and endangered species, are thought to be closely linked to climate change. The paper provides a precise prediction of how some biomes will adapt to future greenhouse climate change, not only informing us to prepare for these changes, but also reminding us to pay more attention to and protect groups or species that cannot produce these related adaptations. In particular, the Bergman's Law, the Grogg's Law, and Allen's Law are certain to apply to humanity, as may Hesse's Law and Rabbert's, and we need to be more alert to possible changes in future human beings themselves.
    , published in the December 2020 issue of current biology, suggest that other biologists think the problem is far from solved. Kaspar Delhey, an ornithologist who lives in Australia, says he doesn't think the conclusion is that simple, and there's still a lot of work to be done. He works remotely for the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany.
    Delhey has been working over the past few years on how to overturn the Grogge Law and replace it with a more accurate theory. The theory, he says, has been surrounded by clouds of suspicion, in part because Grogg listed his data in the book published in 1833, which looked redundant and bad.
    early December 2020, Delhey and three colleagues published their responses to Dr. Tian Li and Professor Benton in The Journal of Current Biology. They think Grogg confuses temperature and humidity. The humid environment allows plants to flourish, providing shade for animals to escape predators. As a result, animals tend to be darker in wet places to disguise themselves. Delhey says many warm places are wet, but so are the wet and cool forests, such as Tasmania, where the blackest birds are found.
    Delhey said that if the variable of humidity is added, the Gloger law will be overturned because warming will cause the animals to become lighter in color. This is especially true of cold-blooded animals, he said. Insects and reptiles rely on external heat sources, and in cold places their dark appearance helps absorb sunlight. In warm climates, this demand is less urgent, and the animals eventually become lighter in color.
    TianLi and Professor Benton said they welcomed the academic clarification. In response to the Delhey team, they cited examples that proved their predictions that animals would darken in warm climates. Finland's tawny owls, for example, are either yellow-brown or light gray, which can be disguised as snow. But as snow fell in Finland, the number of tawny owls increased from 12% in the early 1960s to 40% in 2010.
    they acknowledge that when both temperature and humidity change, predictions of climate-driven color effects become particularly complex. Climate models predict that the Amazon will become hotter and drier, which is agreed to make animals lighter. But Siberia's cold forests are likely to become hotter and wetter, in which case temperature and humidity predictions conflict. Unlike physics or chemistry, Professor Benton says, biological laws are "not absolute, they are not like gravity".
    even if the overall trend remains the same, it is difficult to predict how individual species will change. Lauren Buckley, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, studied the colors of butterflies at high altitudes. Butterflies absorb heat by basking in the sun, but in reality they absorb heat only a small fraction of the time under their wings. Without knowing this, people may quantify the color of the entire wing, but it doesn't really matter. In short, people need to think about how organisms interact with the environment.
    may also depend on the animal's temperature regulation system: cold-blooded animals become lighter in color, but birds and mammals exhibit more diverse results. To improve the forecast, Buckley suggested using museum specimens to broaden the time horizon of the study, even though the color of the specimens in the museum fades over time. Dr. Tian plans to experiment in the room with beetles and moms, actively trying to induce color changes.
    , if humans fail to do enough to curb climate change, more and more animal change data may bring the final answer to the debate. But if this does happen, meaning that many species will go extinct, it will be a regrettable outcome.
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