The American pika: A case study in wildlife acclimating to climate change
Research published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment last month that examines how wildlife adapts to the impacts of global climate change focuses on the American pika, a small, tailless mammal that exhibits a range of adaptive behavioral changes, as a case study.
The authors of the study note that there are a few “primary responses” to climatic variability available to animals in the wild: “move, adapt, acclimate, or die.” When “acclimate” is a species’ response, that will usually require the species to adapt its behavior to the new climatic conditions it finds itself facing.
“Behavioral flexibility allows animals to rapidly cope with changing environmental conditions, and behavior represents an important component of a species’ adaptive capacity in the face of climate change,” the authors write. “However, there is currently a lack of knowledge about the limits or constraints on behavioral responses to changing conditions.”
Sergey Yeliseev