Amazon Rainforest Birds’ Bodies Transform Due to Climate Change
upstart writes:
Amazon Rainforest birds' bodies transform due to climate change:
"Even in the middle of this pristine Amazon rainforest, we are seeing the global effects of climate change caused by people, including us," said Vitek Jirinec, LSU alumnus (Ph.D. '21), associate ecologist at the Integral Ecology Research Center and lead author to this study published in the journal Science Advances.
Birds in the Amazon rainforest have become smaller and their wings have become longer over several generations, indicating a response to the shifting environmental conditions that may include new physiological or nutritional challenges.
This is the first study to discover these changes in non-migratory birds' body size and shape, which eliminates other factors that may have influenced these physiological changes. Jirinec and colleagues studied data collected on more than 15,000 individual birds that were captured, measured, weighed, marked with a leg band and released, over 40 years of field work in the world's largest rainforest. The data reveal that nearly all of the birds' bodies have reduced in mass, or become lighter, since the 1980s. Most of the bird species lost on average about 2 percent of their body weight every decade. For an average bird species that weighed about 30 grams in the 1980s, the population now averages about 27.6 grams. How significant is this?
"These birds don't vary that much in size. They are fairly fine-tuned, so when everyone in the population is a couple of grams smaller, it's significant," said co-author Philip Stouffer, who is the Lee F. Mason Professor in the LSU School of Renewable Natural Resources.
The data set covers a large range of the rainforest so the changes in the birds' bodies and wings across communities are not tied to one specific site, which means that the phenomenon is pervasive.
Journal Reference:
Vitek Jirinec, Ryan C. Burner, Bruna R. Amaral, et al. Morphological consequences of climate change for resident birds in intact Amazonian rainforest, Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abk1743)
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