As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2142

20 Apr 2009: Report

As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish

With global warming pushing some animals and plants to the brink of extinction, conservation biologists are now saying that the only way to save some species may be to move them.

by carl zimmer

In the gentle hills outside York, England, a controversial experiment is quietly unfolding. It began in the summer of 2000 when Steven Willis, a biologist at the University of Durham, and his colleagues drove to a wildlife preserve called Wingate Quarry. In the back of their car was a cage full of butterflies called Marbled Whites. Willis and his colleagues removed the cage from the car, opened it, and let 500 butterflies flutter away across the scrubby meadows.

Marbled Whites are common in Europe and southern England, but in 2000 the northern edge of their range was 65 kilometers south of Wingate Quarry. Yet Willis and his colleagues suspected that they might do well there. Thanks to global warming, Wingate Quarry might now be mild enough for the butterflies to survive.

Since releasing the butterflies, Willis and his students have returned to Wingate Quarry each year. They have walked a transect, counting the Marbled Whites they saw along the way, and have searched the area around the release to see how far they had dispersed. In February, they finally announced the results of their surveys in the journal Conservation Letters. The population of Marbled Whites of Wingate Quarry is steadily growing and slowly increasing its range. “They’re certainly holding their own,” says Willis.

Willis and his colleagues did not move the butterflies purely out of scientific curiosity. A number of studies indicate that global warming will rob many species of their current habitat, pushing them towards extinction. Some conservation biologists argue that the only way to save some species may be to move them to new ranges that they can’t get to themselves.

…

[dipsydoodle]

1. When the land

between what is now the National Gallery and the entrance to The Mall, aka Trafalgar Square was dug up for the footings of Nelsons' Column they found the skeletons of animals now found solely in Africa. So - its happened before just in a different temperature direction i.e downwards.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Important difference

Thousands of years ago, other species had relative freedom to move.

So, for example, let's just say that the African Lion decides to come back to London to stay cool…

BTW: Any documentation on this find?

[dipsydoodle]

3. About half way down this link I found for you

Fossil evidence has revealed that the area we know as Trafalgar Square was at that time populated by hippos, rhinos and elephants.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources-rx/files/43feat_ancenct_human_occup_britain-3012.pdf

Worth ploughing through here too : http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25343-2540172,00.html

I already knew about this stuff from documentaries etc over here which wouldn't necessarily have been seen outside of the UK. Not totally sure but I think that area was a market before the monuments were built c. 1830s in which case it prolly would've been so since Roman Times. As such the land level then would've been 40 feet or so above that of Roman Times and hence any fossils were well protected.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Thanks.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/resources-rx/files/43feat_ancenct_human_occup_britain-3012.pdf

…

Moving forward now to about 200,000 years ago, the archaeological record reveals a surprising decline in the evidence of human occupation in Britain. From the Hoxnian interglacial with its rich sites, each subsequent interglacial indicates a lesser human presence. Pontnewydd Cave in north Wales is one of the few British sites from 200,000 years ago showing human occupation by what seem to be early Neanderthals. The artefacts found there look at first glance rather crude, but in the absence of good local raw materials such as flint, people had to make do with what they could find. They used the prepared core technique to make small hand axes out of local volcanic rocks.

A little later, we come to one of the biggest mysteries of the AHOB project--what happened to the inhabitants of Britain in the millennia after 200,000 years ago? There seems to be a period of at least 100,000 years with no definite evidence of a human presence in Britain. This is very difficult to explain. It seems likely that an ice advance about 150,000 years ago cleared people out of Britain. Then as the climate improved again, sea level may have risen quickly, turning Britain into an island, and people perhaps didn't make it back in time. Fossil evidence has revealed that the area we know as Trafalgar Square was at that time populated by hippos, rhinos and elephants. These megafauna are well documented, but there are no people associated with it, no signs of artefacts or butchered bones. But even when the climate deteriorated again and sea level started to fall, people apparently did not come back straight away, which is very puzzling. AHOB will be using dating techniques such as uranium series, electron spin resonance and luminescence to try to find sites of human occupation in this empty 100,000 year period. Perhaps there are new sites with human occupation or perhaps we have wrongly dated existing sites. Only further research will show how severe and long-lasting was this gap in human occupation.

…

My ancestor came from Wales to New England. However, I don't think he was neanderthal… (His migration was also much more recent, only 350 years ago or so…)

[dipsydoodle]

4. Forgot to mention

that you're right of course with regard to "Thousands of years ago, other species had relative freedom to move."

For starters the English Channel wasn't - it was dry land. I don't recall during which period the Mediteranean Sea wasn't' but during that period it was one of the world's deepest valleys, Chances are it supported no life at all due to the high temperature at the depth of over a mile below sea level on a bed of salt.