Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Experts have long predicted that warming temperatures will be a veritable death sentence for most types of lizards, but the scientists behind a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) study have found one species that has adapted quite nicely.
The lizard in question is the brown anolis lizard (also known as the brown anole), a native of Cuba and the Bahamas that researchers from Dartmouth College and University of Virginia have found to be surprisingly resilient to the increased heat resulting from global climate change.
According to the Washington Post, the study authors report that the two-degree increase in temperatures expected to occur during the rest of the century will likely have an adverse effect on most types of lizard, but the brown anole shows that the creatures are capable of adapting.
The researchers took male lizards from the cooler, forested end of a Bahamian island to a peninsula that provided little respite from the heat. Much to their surprise, they found that nearly one-fourth of the lizards were able to withstand an environment two degrees warmer than their native habitats, evolving and adapting to their conditions.
The lizards that were able to survive found a way to quickly catch prey, digest it, and quickly escape predators through what the newspaper described as “a sort of micro-evolution” event. This discovery challenges the idea that lizards will be unable to adapt over the course of several generations in order to tolerate what is expected to be a rapidly warming climate.
Ryan G. Calsbeek, an associate professor at Dartmouth and a co-author of the study, told the Post that he and his colleagues were “blown away” by the findings, which they said proves that scientists don’t yet know enough about the biology of some types of creatures to effectively predict what will happen to those species as temperatures grow warmer all over the world.
“The prediction is that these animals are hosed. If the climate warms a couple of degrees as climate scientists predict, we can kiss these animals goodbye,” Calsbeek said. This study suggests that there could be “some salvation for them,” explaining that he is not 100 percent convinced that lizards will be able to survive, that that it is possible that they could adapt.
“We’re not saying climate change isn’t a huge problem with massive negative consequences,” he explained. However, their research reveals that scientists could observe “some potential positive outcomes” in response to climate change, and some “very negative outcomes” in other instances.
The study was led by Michael L. Logan, a doctoral candidate at Dartmouth when the research was conducted, and co-authors included Calsbeek and University of Virginia associate professor Robert M. Cox. The trio captured 100 lizards in a forested area of Eleuthera and transplanted them to a harsher, hotter region of the same island, and found that 22 of them adapted to their new conditions far more quickly than they could have anticipated.
“What I think this work demonstrates is that, as scientists, we need to consider all the avenues that a species can adapt to in its climate,” said Logan. “They can deal with temperatures in their same life span. We see that many species do have more resilience to a situation than what we give them credit for. We should see how they respond even to these incredibly rapid shifts.”
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