Adaptation or Extinction: Animals and Climate Change
Global climate change has been implicated in the extinction of some animal species, changes in the geographic ranges of others, and many species appear to be increasingly vulnerable to both biotic (e.g. disease, competitors) and abiotic (e.g. temperature, acidification, pollutants, drought) stressors. Will different animal species adapt to global climate change or disappear? What influences their survival? Is variation among individuals in a population a substrate for adapting to changes in the environment or are these changes occurring too rapidly? We will examine these questions in discussions of papers from the primary literature. Students will design and conduct research projects informed by the questions we discuss.
Syllabus
Course Requirements
See how to read and facilitate
- Attend all classes and be well-prepared
- Read assignments AND take notes
- Browse current journals
- In class discussion (facilitate and participate) This is a discussion class.You are to talk to each other during class.
- Research project: Think about variables that are changing due to anthropomorphic activities and generate your research in that context.
Independent variables that affect animals
Dependent variables we can measure
Animals we can study
By Midterm:- Things to consider during proposal presentation
- Research proposal with literature cited - due
Final work: - Presentation
- Poster (instructions)
- Paper in format of any journal we've read in which the references are embedded in the text (e.g. Jones et al, 2015)
- Organization of final paper
- General
- Toward a conceptual synthesis for climate change responses (2012)
- The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship (2011)
- The Impact of Climate Change on the World’s Marine Ecosystems (2010)
- Impacts of ocean acidification on marine fauna and ecosystem processes (2008)
- Marine defaunation: animal loss in the global ocean (2015)
- Applying evolutionary biology to global challenges (2014)
- Climate change and evolutionary adaptation (2011)
- Evolutionary response of the egg hatching date of a herbivorous insect under climate change (2012)
- Climate change and unequal phenological changes across four trophic levels: constraints or adaptations (2009)
- Integrating biophysical models and evolutionary theory to predict climatic impacts on species’ ranges: the dengue mosquito Aedes aegypti in Australia (2009)
- Behavior
- Climate change and frog calls: long-term correlations along a tropical altitudinal gradient (2014)
- Early emergence in a butterfly causally linked to anthropogenic warming (2010)
- Proximity to agriculture is correlated with pesticide tolerance: evidence for the evolution of amphibian resistance to modern pesticides. (2013)
- Pesticide tolerance in amphibians: induced tolerance in susceptible populations, constitutive tolerance in tolerant populations. (2013)
- Invasive species
- Invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish Pterois volitans reduce recruitment of Atlantic coral-reef fishes (2008)
- Effects of invasive Pacific red lionfish Pterois volitans versus a native predator on Bahamian coral-reef fish communities (2013)
- Double trouble: the expansion of the suez canal and marine bioinvasions in the Mediterranean sea (2014)
- Modelling species distributions without using species distributions (2008)
- Geographical range, heat tolerance and invasion success in aquatic species (2015)
- Physiology
- A physiological trait-based approach to predicting the responses of species to experimental climate warming (2012)
- Thermal-safety margins and the necessity of thermoregulatory behavior across latitude and elevation (2015)
- Acute physiological responses of the freshwater snail (2009)
- Physiological basis for high CO2 tolerance in marine ectothermic animals (2009)
- Acid-base background
- Differences in critical thermal maxima and mortality across life stages of the mealworm beetle Tenebrio molitor (2012)
- Odor tracking in sharks is reduced under future ocean acidification conditions (2014)
- Thermal tolerance breadths among groundwater crustaceans living in a thermally constant environment (2013)
- Climate Change Affects Marine Fishes Through the Oxygen Limitation of Thermal Tolerance (2007)
- Phenotypic plasticity mediates climate change responses among invasive and indigenous arthropods (2015)
- Is adaptation to climate change really constrained in niche specialists? (2014)
- **Climate Change, Multiple Stressors, and the Decline of Ectotherms (2012)
- Effects of road de-icing salt (NaCl) on larval wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) (2006)
- Integrating metabolic performance, thermal tolerance, and plasticity enables for more accurate predictions on species vulnerability to acute and chronic effects of global warming (2014)
- Cool papers for research ideas
- The body temperature of active amphibians along a tropical elevation gradient (2013)
- Modeling species distributions without using species distributions2008 (cane toads in Australia)
- Do the numbers and locations of road-killed anuran carcasses accurately reflect impacts of vehicular traffic? (2014)
- The Effects of Temperature, Body Size, and Hydration State on the Terrestrial Locomotion of the Crayfish Orconectes rusticus (2000)
- The effects of metals on embryo-larval and adult life stages of the sea urchin, Diadema antillarum. (2005)
- Local adaptation to road adjacency in an amphibian (2012)