Mark Conlin/V&W/Image Quest Marine

Shrink or sink
k
In a hotter world, it’s survival of the smallest.
Henry Nicholls reports on an extraordinary phenomenon

40 | NewScientist | 9 February 2013


T
HE polar bear is the largest land
carnivore on the planet. Male bears
typically weigh around 400 kilograms,
and a few grow up to 600 kg. At least, that’s
how big they used to be. In Alaska, and perhaps
elsewhere, polar bears are no longer growing
as large as they did just two decades ago.
At the other end of the spectrum, the
saffron-bellied frog of Borneo is so small – just
20 millimetres long – that it is difficult to spot
despite its marbled blue back and brightly
spotted underside. And it is becoming even
harder to spot, because it too is shrinking.
Right across the animal kingdom – from fish
to amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals –
reports are coming in of changes in body size,
usually of animals getting smaller. This
matters because body size affects everything,
from the ability to catch food to the chances of
escaping from predators to finding a mate.
So why is the size of many animals changing,
and will the trend continue?
Many biologists think the answer is related
to an observation made in 1847 by the
zoologist Christian Bergmann. He pointed out
that if you look at closely related species of
mammals and birds, you find the smaller
species tend to live in warmer climes. This
pattern, Bergmann reasoned, was to do with
surface area and volume. Smaller animals
have a higher surface area-to-volume ratio, so
they lose heat faster and struggle to maintain
their body temperature when it is very cold.
Larger animals have the opposite problem –
they struggle to stay cool when it’s hot.
Cool running
Bergmann’s “rule”, as this tendency has been
misnamed, doesn’t mean large warm-blooded
animals do not live in warm climates. Even
very big animals can evolve to cope with heat,
as elephants prove. Rather, for a given set of
adaptations to heat or cold, a smaller body is
better in warmer conditions. The implication
is obvious – as the world gets warmer, animals
will get smaller.
This seems to be exactly what is happening
to the semi-wild sheep on the Scottish island
of Soay, in the St Kilda archipelago. More
smaller individuals are surviving as winters
become milder, resulting in a decline in the
sheep’s average size (Science, vol 325, p 464).
Many birds are shrinking too. For instance,
Janet Gardner, an ecologist at Monash
University in Melbourne, and colleagues
studied museum specimens of eight small
Australian birds collected before and after
1950. They found a decline in body size in four
species. “The body size of a bird found in
Brisbane in 1900 now occurs round Sydney,”
says Gardner. The birds haven’t moved, she
says; instead, they have downsized in
response to their warmer world.
The observed changes in size are small –
around half a per cent in the case of the Soay
sheep, for instance. But this is not surprising
given that the world has warmed less than a
degree so far, and that wildlife has had little
time to respond. What will happen over a
longer period?
The only way to answer this question is to
turn to the past. The closest parallel to today’s
warming is the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum (PETM) about 56 million years ago
when the world warmed by 5 or 10 °C before
slowly cooling again, although the warming
probably took place over tens of thousands
of years rather than a few hundred.
Many mammals did become smaller during
the PETM and larger afterwards, but with only
a handful of fossils to go on, it wasn’t clear if
this was a response to the changing climate. >
9 February 2013 | NewScientist | 41

When the going gets tough,
the tough… get TINIER
It must be a mistake, thought Martin
Wikelski. He had been measuring
the size of marine iguanas in the
Galapagos. After the 1998 El Niño,
he wasn’t surprised to find that
individuals were losing weight. What
was hard to believe was that their
bodies were becoming shorter, too.
But there was no mistake: it turns
out that adult iguanas can reverse
normal growth by shrinking their
skeleton. “It has to be one of the
most dramatic documented
illustrations of shrinking in response
to a change in climate,” says Wikelski,
now at the Max Planck Institute for
Mark Carwardine/NaturePL
Ornithology in Germany.
Since then, it has emerged that
a few other species can do this too.
The world’s smallest tortoise, for
instance, can shrink its shell during
times of drought, reducing the
volume by as much as 12 per cent.
Studies on young brown trout have
also found that fish can get 10 per
cent shorter over the course of a
particularly harsh winter. How
widespread this strategy might be
is unclear, says Wikelski. “It’s still
probably too early to tell what kind
of conditions have to be met for
shrinkage to evolve,” he says.

Last year, however, a team produced a far more
detailed fossil record of several species of
horse – the size of cats at this time – that lived
in what is now the Bighorn basin in Wyoming.
This showed that their body size did correlate
with temperature, shrinking by 30 per cent as
the climate warmed, then growing 70 per cent
as it cooled (Science, vol 335, p 959).
These were huge changes (see graph,
opposite). And while correlation doesn’t
prove causation, the temperature change is
the most likely explanation. It is already clear
that climate change will have a massive effect
on wildlife by altering where plants and
animals can survive, and when they do
things. Now it seems animals that continue
living where they are could undergo dramatic
changes in body size. What’s more, it is not
just warm-blooded vertebrates that will
be affected.
A study, also in Wyoming, of the fossilised
traces left by soil-dwelling invertebrates found
that they shrank too, with the diameter of
burrows reducing on average by 30 to 50 per
cent as the climate warmed. “I was kind of
shocked when we found the extent of the
decrease,” says Jon Smith, a geologist at the
University of Kansas. “It’s entirely possible
that soil biota are going to respond to modern
climate change in a similar way,” he says.
No one is claiming that all animals will
shrink, though. While there is some validity
to Bergmann’s “rule”, there are plenty of
exceptions. The way in which animals are
affected by climate is much more complex
than Bergmann envisaged. “There are
examples of organisms shrinking, some
not shrinking and a few even getting bigger,”
says Jennifer Sheridan, an ecologist at the
University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
Short-term responses to warming could
also be quite different to long-term responses.
Take the polar bears in Alaska, for instance.
The most likely explanation for their declining
body size is a lack of food (Ecological
Applications, vol 20, p 768). The bears hunt
seals and other prey on and around Arctic sea
ice, and hunting is becoming harder because
of the dramatic loss of sea ice.
For some animals, though, food availability
has increased, which may explain why a few
species are growing larger than normal. These
effects are probably temporary: population
sizes are likely to increase or decline until their
numbers are back in balance with the food
supply. So if polar bears avoid extinction, their
body size could recover. Animals that are
”A Komodo dragon would
have to find an extra
224 chickens a year to
maintain its body size”
shrinking as a direct result of rising
temperatures, however, are likely to stay small
as long as the climate remains warmer.
There is a lot of debate among biologists
about whether the changes seen so far are
merely due to the development of animals
being influenced by the changing
environment, or are a result of natural
selection, that is, genetic. There’s no easy way
to tell, and the answer may be different for
different animals. Clearly, though,
evolutionary changes will be longer-lasting.
Yet rising temperatures do not always
favour animals with a smaller body. Mass
die-offs of small birds and bats in extreme
heat have long been reported, and they are
becoming more frequent as extreme heat
becomes more common. The reason, it seems,
is that smaller animals with a relatively high
surface area do not just lose heat faster; they
also lose water faster. When the thermometer
soars and there is no easily accessible water,
tiny birds can become dehydrated in as little
as 2 hours, even when resting in the shade
(Biology Letters, vol 6, p 253).
So although warmer average temperatures
favour smaller body size, heat extremes
favour larger bodies when water is scarce.
The pressure of selection can thus swing from
one direction to the other depending on the
weather. Whether populations grow larger
or smaller in stature, or don’t change much
at all, depends on which factor predominates.
For cold-blooded animals, including
invertebrates, a warming climate poses
some distinctive challenges. For starters,
development is faster when it is warmer,
so animals reach adulthood sooner. But
growth does not usually keep up, meaning
most end up smaller.
The speed of cold-blooded animals’
metabolism also depends largely on the
ambient temperature. This might seem like
an advantage, allowing them to be more
active, but there can be big drawbacks, too.
A faster metabolism burns up more energy
even when animals are not active – which
means they need to eat more.
Sheridan and colleagues have made some
rough calculations of the consequences for
amphibians and reptiles. If the climate warms
by 6 °C this century, as some have predicted, a
tiny species like the ornate narrow-mouthed
frog of India, which typically weighs just
0.3 grams, would need to eat up to 75 per cent
more, or an additional 426 termites a year,
she predicts. A 90-kilogram Komodo dragon
would have to find an extra 224 chickens a
year to maintain its body size.
“If organisms can consume more resources
to match their increased metabolism, they can
maintain their growth rates and they’ll be the
same size,” says Sheridan. But finding more to

42 | NewScientist | 9 February 2013


eat can be hard when it’s hotter. A study of
lizards found that they are having to spend
more time in the shade to avoid overheating,
leaving less time for hunting or foraging.
And there might not be any more food to
find. If the same number of animals are
competing for the same amount of food,
then something has to give. “They will have to
sacrifice something, and growth is likely to be
one of the first things to go,” Sheridan says.
This could be why some amphibians and
reptiles are already shrinking. A 20-year study
of toads in Dorset, UK, found that their body
size is declining, for instance. In her work on
frogs in Borneo, Sheridan has found that the
number of species that are getting smaller
outstrips the number that are growing.
These findings may seem surprising given
that giant reptiles and amphibians thrived
during many epochs when the planet was
hotter than it is now. The best known,
including dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine
reptiles, were probably warm-blooded, but
plenty of cold-blooded behemoths thrived in
the heat, too, such as Titanoboa – a stonking
13-metre-long snake weighing over a tonne.
“When you are a great big, giant reptile, you
need to have warmer environments just to
maintain your body temperature,” says Jason
Head, a palaeontologist at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, and a member of the team
that described Titanoboa. “I don’t know of a
time interval in the fossil record where body
size has decreased in either amphibians or
reptiles in response to warming.”
“Over long timescales, you will get the
evolution of gigantism,” says Sheridan. But
the world has never warmed as fast as it is
doing so now, and the short-term result is that
reptiles and amphibians are likely to get
smaller, she says.
Fish, too, will shrink. They face a double
whammy: rising water temperatures will
Steve Winter/National Geographic/Getty
Heat shrunk
During the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, global temperatures rose
as much as 10 °C. Fossils of a cat-sized early horse, Sifrhippus, show it shrank
dramatically as the world warmed, and grew as it cooled
10kg
WARMING
Size (weight)
4kg
decrease
~55.8
speed up their metabolism and thus their
need for oxygen, but there will be less and less
of it because oxygen is less soluble in warmer
water. The consequences are inevitable. “The
fish will run out of oxygen at a smaller body
size,” says William Cheung of the University of
British Columbia in Canada, whose team has
studied the impact of warming on marine life
(Nature Climate Change, doi.org/kbn).
Adapt or die
For animals struggling to adapt to warmer
conditions, the obvious answer is to move
somewhere cooler. In the oceans, many species
are already doing exactly this. But migrating
can be difficult or impossible. Paths may be
blocked by natural barriers such as mountains
or seas, or by fences, roads, cities and farmland.
Some animals must adapt to a warmer
world, or die. And adapting by changing your
body size can bring its own problems. One is
that smaller individuals have fewer offspring,
says Sheridan. “If you take that to the extreme,
you could potentially have a population that
gets so small that it becomes vulnerable,
endangered or even extinct.”
Assessing the body
size of animals isn’t
always a simple task
~175,000 years
COOLING 75%
increase
Size estimates
based on molars from
Bighorn basin, Wyoming
30% US
~55.6
Million years ago
Another is that smaller animals may find it
more difficult to capture some prey, and may
also become more vulnerable to predators.
“If everything were shrinking at the same rate
then you’d basically just have a miniaturised
version of the world, and everything would
just be a little bit cuter,” says Sheridan. But
with different species responding to climate
change in different ways, there will be winners
and losers, which by itself will cause
considerable ecological ripples.
“Body size is, in my view at least, the
most important characteristic of an animal,
linked to all kinds of other traits,” says Martin
Wikelski, an ecologist at the Max Planck
Institute for Ornithology in Germany.
Changing it has myriad knock-on effects.
And changing body sizes is just one of many
challenges facing wildlife. We’re not only
causing the world to warm faster than it ever
has since animals appeared, we’re also making
it incredibly difficult for them to survive this
change. By overexploiting animals, destroying
their habitat and spreading diseases, we have
already driven many species extinct –
especially large ones that breed slowly – and
eliminated much of the genetic variation in
surviving populations. This greatly reduces
the chances of these species evolving fast
enough to keep up with the challenges of a
rapidly changing world.
We will almost certainly feel the
consequences, too. Although the effects of
reduction in body size in the oceans are
unpredictable, says Cheung, one result could
be a collapse in fish stocks. If other ecosystems
we depend on find themselves in similar
turmoil, then the looming food crisis will be
even more serious. Perhaps, like polar bears,
people will end up shrinking too. n
Henry Nicholls is a freelance writer based in London.
Follow him on @WayOfThePanda
9 February 2013 | NewScientist | 43