7 Species Hit Hard by Climate Change—Including One That's Already Extinct

Climate change has already brought "widespread and consequential" impacts, a new report says, and many species are struggling to adapt.

By Christine Dell'Amore
Published 6 Nov 2017, 16:40 GMT
polar bear climate change story 1200
Photograph by Paul Souders, Corbis

Climate change is doing "widespread and consequential" harm to animals and plants, which are struggling to adapt to new conditions, according to a major report released Monday.

The report, from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finds that many life-forms are moving north or into deeper waters to survive as their habitats shift.

They're also being forced to change their behaviors. For instance, many birds are nesting, breeding, and migrating earlier as spring arrives sooner than before.

"Evidence of climate change impacts is strongest and most comprehensive for natural systems," the report said.

Current research suggests that winners in this transformation will be adaptable species that are expanding their ranges, including many weeds and pests, and also cold-sensitive, invasive species like the Burmese python in Florida, said Peter Alpert, a program director in environmental biology at the U.S. National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.

The losers, Alpert said, will likely be the species that are highly specialised in what they eat or where they live, especially those whose habitats disappear completely.

That might include species such as koalas, which depend mainly on eucalyptus for survival, and the many animal and plant species that live only on isolated mountaintops.

"You have to hope that they can change fast enough to keep up with it," he said. "Species have experienced swings like this in the past, but [the changes] have probably taken a thousand times longer."

Bob Scholes and Hans-Otto Pörtner, both IPCC authors who contributed to the report's ecosystems chapters, agreed, in a joint statement to National Geographic, that the current human-made climate change is happening much faster than in the past.

Scholes, a systems ecologist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria, South Africa, and Pörtner, an animal physiologist and marine biologist based at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, highlighted six species that are already in decline due to climate change:

  • Orange-spotted filefish (Oxymonacanthus longirostris). The filefish dwells in coral reef habitats, on which it is totally dependent, and which themselves are declining in part due to climate change. In addition, the orange-spotted filefish is highly sensitive to warm water: The animal went extinct in Japan during an episode of warmer ocean temperatures in 1988.
  • Quiver tree (Aloe dichotoma). This succulent tree is endemic to (and emblematic of) the arid west of South Africa and Namibia. Chapter Four of the fifth IPCC report "shows, for the first time, that the rate of climate change can be just as important for species survival as the magnitude, and that trees are the most vulnerable to rapid change," Scholes said. A well-studied species, the quiver tree is unable to grow and disperse quickly enough to keep up with a fast-changing climate.
  • Polar bear. The large predator's story is well known: The Arctic sea ice on which the animals hunt is progressively disappearing during the summer. Sea ice is forming later in the fall and disappearing earlier in the spring. "As the Arctic sea ice retreats, polar bears have to exploit alternative food sources, such as on land," the scientists said, and some hungry polar bears have turned to goose eggs. But it's not the best alternative, Steven Amstrup, chief scientist for Polar Bears International, noted in a previous story. "Some media reports have suggested that this might mean polar bears could just come ashore and eat terrestrial foods and somehow do fine without the sea ice," Amstrup said. "We have absolutely no evidence that they have the ability to do this."
  • Adélie penguin. These Antarctic birds mostly live on tiny crustaceans called krill. Krill live on the undersides of ice sheets, where they find refuge and algae as food. But as Antarctic sea ice retreats, krill populations are falling—meaning that the penguins have to migrate farther to find food. Spending a lot more energy to find food makes penguins less successful at breeding and raising young, the scientists said.
  • North Atlantic cod. Overfishing has historically caused numbers of this fish to plunge, but its populations usually bounce back. Not so off the northeastern coast of North America, where populations have not recovered since crashing in the 1990s. "The entire ecosystem seems to have changed," the scientists said, and "this may involve a climate influence due to changing ocean currents and the influx of cold Arctic waters."
  • Acropora cervicornis and coral worldwide. This reef-building animal "is in decline almost everywhere, for a combination of reasons," said Pörtner, including warming waters—coral are sensitive to changes in ocean temperature. Acropora cervicornis, for instance, used to be widespread in the Caribbean but is now restricted to a few small areas, likely due to warming.
  • EXTINCT: Golden toad (Bufo periglenes). Along with the Monteverde harlequin frog (Atelopus varius), also of Central America, the golden toad is among the very small number of species whose recent extinction has been attributed with medium confidence to climate change, according to Scholes and Pörtner. Last seen in 1989, the golden frog lived in mountaintop cloud forests that have disappeared due to drought and other climatic changes. Other confounding factors are involved, such as the deadly chytrid fungus, which has killed off many amphibians worldwide.

Radical Action Needed

Trying to slow the rate of climate change "is critical for the future of many species," Scholes and Pörtner said.

"To spare many thousands of species, not only do we need to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but we also have to do it soon," they said.

Potential climate change solutions include making vehicles, homes, and buildings more energy efficient and increasing wind and solar power, hydrogen produced from renewable sources, and other alternative energies.

Meanwhile, the world can "greatly assist by reducing the other pressures facing species, principally habitat loss, overharvesting, and pollution; and by ensuring that species have unimpeded pathways for movement."

Follow Christine Dell'Amore on Twitter and Google+.

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