Photo: CHRISTOPHE SIMON / Getty Images
By: EFE
Wednesday, October 2
Birds are getting smaller and thinner due to climate change
In the last forty years, human-induced climate change has not only reduced the number of birds in the Amazon rainforest but has also changed their size: have become smaller and with longer wings .
This is warned by a study, published this Friday in Science Advances, which explains that these physical changes, which have occurred over several generations, have helped birds adapt to increasingly hot and dry conditions of the dry season (from June to November).
“ Even in the middle of the pristine Amazon rainforest, we are seeing the global effects of climate change caused by people ”, warns Vitek Jirinec , an ecologist at Louisiana State University (LSU) and lead author of the study (the first to discover changes in body size and shape s of non-migratory birds).
To conduct the study, the authors analyzed data from more than 15, 000 birds captured, measured, weighed, marked and released in the Amazon in the last 40 years.
The data showed that, since the decade of 1980, almost all bird bodies have reduced their mass o have become lighter and most species have lost an average of 2% of their body weight each decade . For a species that weighed about 30 grams in the decade of 1980, the population now weighs an average of 27. 6 grams .
In addition, the data was collected in a wide area of the tropical forest, which shows that the changes of the birds are not limited to a specific site but that it is a “significant and generalized” phenomenon that probably not only affects birds .
“If you look out your window and think about what you are seeing, you will see that the conditions are not as they were 40 years and it is very likely that plants and the animals are responding to those changes “, reasons Philip Stouffer, LSU researcher and study co-author.
The scientist s investigated 60 species of tropical rainforest birds that live from the cool and dark forest floor to the warmer and sunniest forest and discovered that those that reside in the highest part of the understory and are more exposed to heat and drier conditions, showed more drastic changes in their weight and wings .
The authors believe that birds have adapted to a warmer and drier climate by reducing the load on their wings (weight) and lengthening their length to be more energy efficient in the flight. It is their way of adapting to climate change, but will they be able to cope with an increasingly hot and dry environment? That question remains unanswered, conclude the authors .
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