University of Wisconsin researcher Jessica Blois crawling out of Samwell Cave in California, from where she excavated fossils that she used to determine how small mammals responded to natural climate changes. Credit: Stanford University
The temperatures predicted as a result of human-driven climate change are likely to be warmer than any that some small mammal species have seen in their evolutionary history. So suggests Jessica Blois, a University of Wisconsin researcher who has studied how the balance between these species has changed over the last 18,000 years. “Presumably, because they have survived to the present, most species can deal with the range of climate change we have seen in the past,” she tells Simple Climate. “But our inferences from the past don’t allow us to predict with as much confidence whether or how they’ll be able to deal with future climates.”
Blois’ work, recently published in the leading journal Nature, used information gathered from fossils in a cave in Northern California to assess the impacts of previous warming periods. She found that one small mammal species – the deer mouse – fared much better than others, like gophers and squirrels, which became increasingly rare. “The data in the paper show that diversity declined with post-glacial warming,” she explains. Read the rest of this entry »
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