Some animals and plants are rapidly adapting to our warming, polluted world. How alarming that is depends on your perspective.
, for Phenotypic Rates of Change Evolutionary and Ecological Database), Hendry and colleagues reexamined five key questions raised by previous work. They confirmed, for instance, that on average, all over the world, animal species seem to be getting smaller. This runs contrary to a theory of evolution called Cope’s rule, which posits that species should increase in size over time. “It’s better to be larger,” says Kiyoko Gotanda, a coauthor on the paper who is now at Brock University in Ontario.
To compare changes across species over time, the researchers used metrics called darwins and haldanes . These are statistical measures that offer a way to compare the vastly different types of information in the database—from the height of birch trees growing near smelting operations in Russia to how the acidification of Swedish lakes is affecting frog survival rates.
The effects of climate change will not be felt evenly all over the world: In the Arctic, it might mean polar bears developing new hunting behaviors that don’t rely on ice; in the oceans, it might mean that strains of coral already adapted to living in stressful environments, supplanting the ones we now know. “A lot of them are evolving really fast in response to these changes,” says Sanderson.
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