As climate change transforms our world, the impacts will be felt unequally, with some animals struggling to survive and others finding ways to overcome the resulting challenges.
Climate change contributes to these extinction risks in complex and interconnected ways, some of which are still-unknown. It will affect populations directly by inducing extreme weather events, like storms; by driving up temperatures or reducing rainfall beyond the thresholds a species needs to survive; and by shrinking key habitats on which animals depend.
The huge complexity of animal relationships within natural ecosystems, plus the uncertainty over how extreme climate change will get, makes it difficult to drill down into such data and pinpoint which animals will do better than others as our world warms. However, Strona's research did pick up on a general trend:"What we found is that larger species and species at high trophic [food chain] levels will be more adversely affected," he told Live Science.
Faster breeding may benefit species in a changing climate because they're more adaptable to changing habitats; fast breeding cycles give these species an"opportunity to survive these peaks in environmental disruption," such as extreme weather or habitat loss, Albaladejo Robles explained. Meanwhile, slower-breeding animals showed the opposite trend in the study, and their populations declined when temperature and habitat changed.
Species with more niche diets, such as pandas and koalas, may be at increased risk under environmental change, too. By contrast, the broad diets of generalist feeders, such as crows and raccoons, give them a wide range of foods to fall back on if one food source disappears. And yet, even their seemingly indestructible bodies have limits, according to some of Strona's previous research. This study, published in the journal Scientific Reports , simulated how tardigrades would fare under extreme cold and warming based on their temperature-tolerance levels alone. The research confirmed that the tardigrades could withstand incredible extremes.