Half of All Species Are on the Move—And We're Feeling It

As climate change displaces everything from moose to microbes, it’s

affecting human foods, businesses, and diseases.
BY CRAIG WELCH
PUBLISHED APRIL 27, 2017 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The shrubs probably responded first. In the 19 th century, alder and flowering willows in the
Alaskan Arctic stood no taller than a small child—just a little over three feet. But as
temperatures warmed with fossil fuel emissions, and growing seasons lengthened, the
shrubs multiplied and prospered. Today many stand over six feet.

Bigger shrubs drew moose, which rarely crossed the Brooks Range before the 20th century.
Now these spindly-legged beasts lumber along Arctic river corridors, wherever the
vegetation is tall enough to poke through the deep snow. They were followed by snowshoe
hares, which also browse on shrubs.

Today moose and hares have become part of the subsistence diet for indigenous hunters in
northern Alaska, as melting sea ice makes traditional foods like seals harder to chase.

That's just one of thousands of ways in which human-caused climate change is altering life
 for plants and animals, and in the process having direct and sometimes profound impacts
on humans. As the planet warms, species are shifting where, when, and how they thrive.
They are moving up slopes and toward the poles. That is already altering what people can
eat; sparking new disease risks; upending key industries; and changing how entire cultures
use the land and sea.

"We're talking about a redistribution of the entire planet's species," says Gretta Pecl, lead
author of a new study in Science that examined the implications of wildlife on the move.

Germs and Pests on the March

The changes already are quite dramatic. Malaria, for example, now appears higher up
mountain slopes in Colombia and Ethiopia, as rising thermostats make way for mosquitoes
at higher elevations. Leishmaniasis, a sometimes-fatal, once primarily tropical
affliction, has moved into northern Texas as the sandflies that host the disease-causing
parasite head north.

Agriculture is feeling the effects too, as crop pests expand their range. Diamondback
moths, which ravage the cabbages, kale, and cauliflower grown by poor urban farmers, are
spreading in South Africa. In Latin America, coffee plant funguses and pests are
appearing in new areas, threatening a key industry. The same is happening to French
olives, wine grapes, and lavender. And in the United States, scientists suspect climate
change has promoted the increasingly rapid spread of Johnson grass, a highly invasive
weed that reduces yields for legumes, corn, sorghum, and soybean.
Some people are benefiting: Atlantic mackerel have moved so far north that the Icelandic
fleet, which once caught the fish only by accident, now shares a major industry with
Europe. The point is that the effects of climate change on wildlife, for good or (mostly) for
ill, are already significant.

"The biological data is incredibly striking, but we haven't really gotten the story out," Pecl
says. "We're undergoing the greatest change to our environmental systems that the world
has seen in millions of years. And it's affecting people."

Half of All Life Is Moving

Scientists have long assumed that species would shift their range as climate conditions
shift. They just didn't expect it would happen so fast.

A tally of more than 4,000 species from around the world shows that roughly half are on
the move. The ones on land are moving an average of more than 10 miles per decade, while
marine species are moving four times faster. Some individual species are moving far more
quickly. Atlantic cod and Europe's purple emperor butterfly, according to Camille
Parmesan, a scientist at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, moved more than 125
miles in a single decade.

Warming is also shifting the timing of biological cycles. Globally, frogs and other
amphibians are breeding an average of eight days earlier with each passing decade, while
birds and butterflies are reproducing four days earlier. By revisiting records kept
by Walden author Henry David Thoreau, scientists showed that plants of all kinds in
Concord, Massachusetts, now flower about 18 days earlier than they did in the 1850s.

"Everywhere throughout the world, things are happening earlier in the spring—in China,
Japan, Korea, across Europe—those are the strongest signals of all," says Richard Primack,
a biology professor at Boston University. "The time that trees and shrubs leaf out in spring
determines the entire timing of the growing season. It can completely change the whole
ecology of the forest."

Where the change will end up isn’t easy to predict; as the species within an ecosystem shift
in space and time, they’re not all shifting at the same pace, and they’re not all responding to
the same signals. Some are adapting to temperature changes, others are more influenced
by sunlight or changes in precipitation. In California, some mountain plants, such as
hemlock, are actually moving downhill, toward warmer temperatures, as climate shifts
bring more precipitation to once dry valleys. In one Colorado region, wildflower blooms
now last a month longer, because flowers no longer bloom all at once.

And all over the world, new hybrid species are appearing—toads, sharks, butterflies, bears,
trout, are among the examples that have been documented so far. The hybrids result from
interbreeding of species that have been newly thrown together by climate change.

Other species are threatened by the unraveling of ecological relationships. Take for
example the red knot, a shorebird that migrates from the tropics to the Arctic each spring
to breed and feed on insects. Because Arctic snows are now melting and insects are
hatching weeks before the birds arrive, there’s too little food for the red knot chicks—and at
least in the case of the population that migrates back to West Africa, the young birds’ beaks
are too small to pluck mollusks from sandy beaches.

Similarly, in West Greenland, the mortality of young caribou is rising because the plants

that mothers eat in calving season are no longer abundant enough. In Japan, the
herb Cordyalis ambigua is now flowering before bumblebees emerge to pollinate it, and as a
result it’s producing fewer seeds. Meanwhile, bumblebees globally are being pushed out of
the southern part of their range by rising temperatures, and for whatever reason are not
expanding their range much in the north.

"Anybody who spends time outside as a bird watcher or fisherman or hunter knows that
timing and migrations are changing," says David Inouye, emeritus professor with the
University of Maryland, College Park, who has worked in the Rocky Mountains for decades.
"I think what might be more novel is the fact that whole communities are being affected."

Increasingly, these species shifts are starting to impact people, especially in the far north,
in ways no one predicted.

No Songs about the Sable

Tero Mustonen, who works with the Finnish group Snowchange Cooperative, has heard a
curious complaint from indigenous leaders in Siberia: "There are no songs about the sable,
there are no old stories about the sable," they tell him. Sables are woodland creatures that
didn’t used to inhabit the Arctic tundra. In and of itself, their recent arrival may not pose a
great challenge—but it symbolizes, Mustonen explains, the extent to which Arctic
landscapes are no longer fully recognizable to the indigenous peoples who have lived there
for centuries. In Sweden there’s a lake that has forever been known as The Lake of Pine
Trees; it’s now surrounded by birch.

Some of the shifts, of course, pose greater challenges. Thawing permafrost is causing lakes
that nomadic Siberians used to fish in, and to water their reindeer in, to vanish into the
ground. In Sweden, lakes and streams previously used for drinking water are now
contaminated with the parasite that causes giardia, the human intestinal illness. Beavers
following willow trees north probably spread the parasite, says Maria Furberg, a research
scientist who is tracking disease outbreaks in the far north.

The incidence of insect-borne tularemia, also known as rabbit fever, has grown 10-fold in
northern Sweden in 30 years, Furberg reports. Just last month scientists announced a 23-
fold increase in tick-borne encephalitis in the Komi Republic, west of Russia's Ural
Mountains. Climate change, they said, has allowed ticks to expand their range.

All these changes are sparking unease among Siberians and Scandinavians in particular,
Mustonen says. "Nature doesn't trust us anymore," some elders have told him.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/climate-change-species-migration-
disease/
1. What is causing plants to shift and move all over the globe?

2. Give an example of a quickly moving species

3. In addition to movement, what else is happening due to global warming?

4. Vocabulary:

What is the meaning of

Subsistence

Spindly-legged

Precipitation

Emeritus

Nomadic