A video of this press release follows. Here’s a screen cap from it.
CLEMSON, S.C. — Wild salamanders living in some of North America’s best salamander habitat are getting smaller as their surroundings get warmer and drier, forcing them to burn more energy in a changing climate.
That’s the key finding of a new study co-authored by a Clemson University biologist and published Tuesday in the journal Global Change Biology that examined museum specimens caught in the Appalachian Mountains from 1957 to 2007 and wild salamanders measured at the same sites in 2011-2012.
The salamanders studied from 1980 onward were, on average, eight percent smaller than their counterparts from earlier decades. The changes were most marked in the Southern Appalachians and at low elevations, settings where detailed weather records showed the climate has warmed and dried out most.
“One of the stresses that warmer climates will impose on many organisms is warmer body temperatures,” said Michael W. Sears of the biological sciences department. “These warmer body temperatures cause animals to burn more energy while performing their normal activities. All else being equal, this means that there is less energy for growth.”
To find out how climate change affected the animals, Sears used a computer program to create an artificial salamander, which allowed him to estimate a typical salamander’s daily activity and the number of calories it burned.
Using detailed weather records for the study sites, Sears was able to simulate the minute-by-minute behavior of individual salamanders based on weather conditions at their home sites during their lifetimes. The simulation showed that modern salamanders were just as active as their ancestors had been.
“Ectothermic organisms, such as salamanders, cannot produce their own body heat,” Sears explained. “Their metabolism speeds up as temperatures rise, causing a salamander to burn seven to eight percent more energy in order to maintain the same activity as their forebears.”
The changing body size of salamanders is one of the largest and fastest rates of change ever recorded in any animal and the data recorded in this study reveals that it is clearly correlated with climate change, according to Karen R. Lips, associate professor at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) department of biology and co-author on the paper.
“We do not know if decreased body size is a genetic change or a sign that the animals are flexible enough to adjust to new conditions,” said Lips. “If these animals are adjusting, it gives us hope that some species are going to be able to keep up with climate change.”
The research team’s next step will be to compare the salamander species that are getting smaller to the ones that are disappearing from parts of their range. If they match, the team will be one step closer to understanding why salamanders are declining in a part of the world that once was a haven for them.
END
[Added, h/t to reader MarcH]
As opposed to less recent studies from 2005 that indicated the reverse is true!
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050913/full/news050912-4.html
Fossil hunters in Yellowstone National Park have discovered an unusual way to record the effects of climate change. Specimens from the past 3,000 years suggest that salamanders have grown bigger as the climate has warmed, and may continue to change as temperatures rise and lakes dry up.
During development, tiger salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) can metamorphose and head for land rather than staying in the water. And warmer climes have made salamanders on land outgrow their water-based relatives, says Elizabeth Hadly of Stanford University in California. Hadley and her colleagues examined almost 3,000 salamander vertebrae from the park’s Lamar Cave in Wyoming.
They could easily replace all those lost tiny salamanders with full-size ‘artificial’ computer generated replicas. No need to feed them either.
Now we know why poly bear populations are so difficult to plot – snakes are moving into the Arctic to escape Climate Change (TM). Whood have thunk it?
So when temperatures were high in the distant past why were dinosaurs so big?
Shaka when the walls fell.
Come on Anthony, you know computer model output is more reliable than mere observations. And if you do have to stoop to actual measurement, its unacceptable to use raw data, until you have tweaked the observations to bring them into line with model predictions.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/16/people-underestimate-the-power-of-models-observational-evidence-is-not-very-useful/
By extension I imagine they must be looking for the Giantest of Giant Salamanders in the cooler climes of Antarctica.
Perhaps the Ship of Fools spotted some on their little Christmas cruise. Did anyone ask?
More moronic rubbish masquerading as science, you couldn’t make it up! When will they learn that computer models just do not work, when there are a large number of variables?
On a similar note our wonderful Met Office had a spokesman on the radio yesterday telling us that UK summers in the future would be hotter and drier than normal and winters wetter and milder due to climate change. He conveniently ignored the spectacularly wrong predictions the Met Office made for the last five years, which have cost the country £millions, also based on computer models.
Can these salamander experts please tell me why a 100,000,000 years ago, when the world was a lot warmer, huge dinosaurs lived and have now evolved into much smaller birds, in a world a lot cooler!
Where are the trolls? Been a complete dearth of them of late. Its like they’re not even trying anymore. I’ve always assumed that they were cold blooded critters distantly related to amphibians and reptiles, you’d think they’d have some insight into this?
OMG! Warming has shrunk the trolls out of existence! People! If you live close to a bridge, check underneath it for signs of trolls. If there are none, this is proof that climate change has killed off the trolls.
Wait… what am I saying? That’s nuts, sending people to look under bridges. Why bother? I just created a computer simulation of trolls, ran it 18,000 times, and in each case got the same result. The troll population has been decimated by…. uhm… the climate models say by climate change…. but the climate data says by the climate not changing. Dangit, the whole program is now in an infinite loop…
Doesn’t warmer weather provide more food for them? And being able to hunt longer every day should move their energy balance in the opposite direction from what the kids claim.
Shrinking salamandars. i’d look more closely at food supply before blaming temperature.Reptiles rates of growth are very sensitive to food supply.
From Ask: “… salamanders were said to be intensely poisonous. Despite this, salamander brandy, a drink prepared by dunking live salamanders in fermenting fruit juices, is reputed to have hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac properties.”
I think I know what these researchers have been doing. Tsk, tsk.
I wonder if weevils will be affected? If it’s a choice between a bigger one or a smaller one I always choose the greater of two weevils.
“Leapin’ Lizards, Sandy! Shrinking salamanders!”
“Arf !”
http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/1996/519816_1m.jpg?v=8C658C99E843A70
“That’s the key finding of a new study co-authored by a Clemson University biologist and published Tuesday in the journal Global Change Biology that examined museum specimens caught in the Appalachian Mountains from 1957 to 2007 and wild salamanders measured at the same sites in 2011-2012.”
Did they consider the possibility that the museum curators like to have bigger specimens in their collections? Because they’re more remarkable, mature, colorful and bigger and because bigger details are easier visible to the audience?
In other words, what they did was compare two completely different sets of measurements. That’s like mixing tree ring temperature proxies with the instrumental temperature record.
andrewmharding says:
March 25, 2014 at 11:42 pm
“On a similar note our wonderful Met Office had a spokesman on the radio yesterday telling us that UK summers in the future would be hotter and drier than normal and winters wetter and milder due to climate change. He conveniently ignored the spectacularly wrong predictions the Met Office made for the last five years,”
The same models predict a wet Saudi Arabia, a prediction that, would it come to pass, make it very difficult to sell Global Warming as something negative; so they’re never talking about that and when asked about it, maintain that they still need to improve the models because quite obviously a wetter Saudi Arabia must be some kind of mistake. Ask them about it when you find a warmist! But they’ve gotten pretty small recently, as Alexa measurements show.
Oh, and thanks for the Godzilla comparison photo, Anthony; wonderful!
Breaking news!
Climate change causes scientists to become lazier
Are model salamanders slimy? Or sticky? Do they put a prune-factor in there to account for deadly desiccation? Did I just read what I think I read? Holy Mother of Pearl, these people are second-generation products of a completely unprincipled education. Common Core crackpots. What’s worse, they haven’t a clue how absolutely clueless they are, or that a journal called “Global Change Biology” has sprouted up to regurgitate the meme. Fan-frikkin-tastic.
davidmhoffer says:
March 26, 2014 at 12:25 am
“You know you gotta pay the toll, ’cause even Trolls like rock & Roll…..”
-Tony Joe White
Who on earth pays for this ridiculous, inconclusive research? I wonder whether these bright boys took into consideration the following: There has been no global warming over the past 18 years, so the reduction in growth must have been over the sixteen years following 1980: Are they commenting on every salamander, or are there bigger salamanders to be found elsewhere in the area? Did they compare like with like in their breeding cycle, if not, is it possible that their specimens were not yet fully grown? Were the 1980 specimens collected at the same time of the year for a true comparison to be made? Did they consider whether it is possible that salamanders might grow bigger in the years when there is more sun, compared to the years when there is less sun? Were the 1980 specimens representative of the size of all salamanders at that time, or were they selected because of their size?
The world is waiting with bated breath for answers to these vital questions, otherwise we are all doomed. Thank god for computer models
There is always the possibility that human nature had some impact on this ‘research’. When preserving specimen, there may have been a temptation to keep the best, ie largest examples.
Well I for one feel a lot safer without those dangerous 100 foot high salamanders around stomping people.
Thank you climate change.
Give the guy a break, he has proven the theory of evolution with nothing more than a computer model. Worth half a Nobel Prize at least!
How come dinosaurs grew so big in all the heat? How come animals shrunk as the world cooled?
Geologic temperature record
The Geological Society of London
Climate Change
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climatechange
It is like some sort of Mad-libs game we used to play as children.
The (insert name of any animal here) will suffer under climate change because it will (insert bad condition here). Using new computer models from (insert your university / institution / organization here), it can be shown that the (insert that same animal name here) will experience catastrophic population (choose increases or decreases here, whichever is worse in this instance) by (insert a date 10 years after you retire here).
Recycle, repeat. It doesn’t matter.