Some species of Australian birds are shrinking and the trend will likely continue because of global warming, a scientist said yesterday.
Janet Gardner, an Australian National University biologist, led a team of scientists who measured museum specimens to plot the decline in size of eight species of Australian birds over the past century.
The research, published last week in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, found the birds in Australia’s southeast had become between 2 percent and 4 percent smaller.
Over the same century, Australia’s average daily temperature rose 0.7ºC, with the sharpest increase since the 1950s.
The research concluded the birds were likely downsizing because smaller bodies shed heat faster than larger ones.
She said she suspected other Australian birds beyond the species studied were also shrinking and the trend will accelerate in the future as a result of global climate change.
“Simply because the predictions are that the warming is going to increase over the coming decades, so you might expect this [shrinking] response to increase as well,” Gardner said.
Michael Kearney, a Melbourne University zoologist who is independent of the research, described its findings as both alarming and providing some hope for the future.
“This study strongly suggests that rising air temperatures in recent history have been stressful enough to prevent the larger individuals of a species from surviving and breeding,” Kearney said.
“That we are seeing a potential evolutionary shift to smaller, and thus more heat-tolerant individuals is an alarming reminder of the consequences of global warming,” he said. “But it also gives us some hope that evolutionary change will provide a temporary buffer in some cases.”
Other studies have found similar trends of shrinking birds and mammals in Britain, Denmark, Israel and New Zealand.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the