Guest essay by Eric Worrall
PLOS ONE has published a study which suggests two thirds of rabbit species will be severely affected by climate change. The authors of the study think climate change will force rabbits to migrate towards the poles, or to higher altitudes, and that some species will suffer significant range declines.
Climate change during the past five decades has impacted significantly on natural ecosystems, and the rate of current climate change is of great concern among conservation biologists. Species Distribution Models (SDMs) have been used widely to project changes in species’ bioclimatic envelopes under future climate scenarios. Here, we aimed to advance this technique by assessing future changes in the bioclimatic envelopes of an entire mammalian order, the Lagomorpha, using a novel framework for model validation based jointly on subjective expert evaluation and objective model evaluation statistics. SDMs were built using climatic, topographical, and habitat variables for all 87 lagomorph species under past and current climate scenarios. Expert evaluation and Kappa values were used to validate past and current models and only those deemed ‘modellable’ within our framework were projected under future climate scenarios (58 species).
Phylogenetically-controlled regressions were used to test whether species traits correlated with predicted responses to climate change. Climate change is likely to impact more than two-thirds of lagomorph species, with leporids (rabbits, hares, and jackrabbits) likely to undertake poleward shifts with little overall change in range extent, whilst pikas are likely to show extreme shifts to higher altitudes associated with marked range declines, including the likely extinction of Kozlov’s Pika (Ochotona koslowi). Smaller-bodied species were more likely to exhibit range contractions and elevational increases, but showing little poleward movement, and fecund species were more likely to shift latitudinally and elevationally. Our results suggest that species traits may be important indicators of future climate change and we believe multi-species approaches, as demonstrated here, are likely to lead to more effective mitigation measures and conservation management. We strongly advocate studies minimising data gaps in our knowledge of the Order, specifically collecting more specimens for biodiversity archives and targeting data deficient geographic regions.
More information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122267
The biggest issue I have with this study is, it doesn’t appear to make any serious allowance for adaption.
The main study includes an acknowledgement that adaptability might play a role – … If species can broaden their occupied bioclimatic niche through trait plasticity, for example, altering their diel patterns of activity, then they may be less susceptible to future change ….
However, it is futile, in my opinion, to attempt to draw conclusions about future range, from a model which appears to treat highly adaptable species as static entities. Even if the global climate changes as radically as alarmists predict, rabbits which are subject to environmental stress won’t stay within their current ecological niches, they will adapt to take advantage of new opportunities.
In less than a century, rabbits introduced from temperate England infested the blistering hot Australian outback, to the point that they became a major economic threat to Australian farmers.
The introduced rabbits, in just a few years, adapted from an average annual temperature of around 40F (10c), to an average annual temperature of around 70F+ (20c+).
Even biological warfare has failed to contain the rabbit plague. Australia runs one of the most advanced biological warfare laboratories in the world, dedicated to finding new rabbit specific plagues, to control numbers. The research is ongoing, because nothing works for long. When a virulent new disease, or a genetically modified version of an old disease is released, the rabbit population crashes, but within a few years it bounces back, as adaptions for resistance to the new disease spread rapidly through the population.
The reason for this adaptability is that rabbits breed like, er rabbits. Any advantageous mutation can reach the entire population within a few generations. Even when subject to extreme stress, such as artificially weaponised diseases, the entire population is reconstituted from a handful of survivors, faster than Australian scientists can find new ways to kill them. The suggestion that a few degrees of warming would have a significant impact on rabbit populations is ridiculous, in the face of the Australian experience.
Didn’t they say the same thing about Pikas that turned out to be false? If I’m not mistaken aren’t there desert dwelling rabbits? Maybe they should try selling used cars instead of this crap.
Maybe they tried (selling used cars) but then someone told them about climate science. They have been on Easy Street since. 🙂
On a recent drive through Arizona desert at night into morning, there were large numbers of rabbits visible munching greens near the roadways. Even the 120+F Phoenix desert doesn’t stop them.
Max response to genetic selection happens in 30 generations (regardless of species), so for rabbits, I make that about 7 to 15 years, perhaps less. I have raised rabbits for decades and selection for small size and a particular coat took only 5 years.
While heat can kill caged rabbits, left free range they burrow and stay cool. Water and predation are limiting, not heat. My dad raised rabbits in Iowa snow and California Central Valley (110 F in the shade and there aint no shade… ) My first rabbits were there, about 55 years ago, so I have some experiance at this. Oh, and the wild jackrabbits of the west are even much more heat and dry tollerant than the European species raised as pets and “poultry”… yes, at the county fairs they are classed with the chickens…
I was out checking the bunny food earlier today. They can eat many kinds of plants and are a hind gut fermenter ruminant. That means they can eat leaves and browse as well as grasses. Though they prefer beans and cabbage or kale family plants. Oh, and hay. They always like hay. They do also chew wood…. The wild radishes and mustards ubiquitous here are just dandy to them.
No climate is going to slow them down. Food competion between species might cause shifts, as can water, and predation. Not much else…
You are correct, water and food are the important requirements. Predation is important for control. rabbits are the natural food of the european buzzard. Breed them to help control.
All my life I’ve been told the cockroaches will inherit the earth after mankind has become extinct. I guess it will actually be those “silly wabbits.”
> If I’m not mistaken aren’t there desert dwelling rabbits?
There most certainly are. Many years ago, I barely missed colliding with a jackrabbit that looked to be roughly the size of a German Shepard on the Mojave Desert road connecting TwentyNine Palms with Amboy.
The desert rabbits have much longer ears than their cousins elsewhere. I’ve been told those long ears are desert rabbits’ temperature control “radiators”.
I love Friday bunny.
….but I couldn’t eat a whole one…
Poor little things. Not just affected, but impacted as well.
Australia is overrun with Rabbits and has been for over 100 years. They were introduced in the 1800s. No need for a fancy model, we have a full continental experiment going on here. Without putting too fine a geographical point on it, the little bastards are everywhere from snowfields to desert.
Yep, snowfields, desert AND both dry and humid tropics 🙁
“Lagomorphs are native on all continents except Antarctica, occurring from sea level to >5,000m and from the equator to 80°N spanning a huge range of environmental conditions.”
But hang on ….
“Non-native ranges for the only three invasive lagomorphs, European hare (Lepus europaeus),
Eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) and European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus),
were not modelled because invasive species are not at equilibrium with the environment and
their niches cannot be transferred in space and time”. [??]
“The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and mountain hare (Lepus timidus) have also been
studied but only in a subset of their range in Australia [19] and Great Britain [20]”.
So Eurobunny gets left out of the study 🙂
Looks like they only studied the European rabbit in 2 places (Australia & Great Britain) where it is a non-native species.
Mice, rats, cane toads, cats (Well, cats are very well suited to a and evolved in a dry and warm climate) all introduced, all doing really well and breeding like, errrmm, rabbits in this scorched land we call Australia.
But CO2 warming is different heat – they can’t take it!
If the polar bears meet them half way wrt adaptation…all should be in balance…:)
Or we end up with giant Polar Rabears.
Oh noes!! Not the rabbits! Damn, there goes my Easter 😪
This article is cutting edge.
http://soleragroup.com/wp-content/gallery/cabinets-joints/cabinet-joint-rabbet.jpg
Now you’re thinking my way.
OMG! Climate change threatens the Fibonacci sequence! Will the horror never end?
The rabbit community right now as it stands is doing perfectly fine but not for long.. The rabbit tipping point will cause a rabbitgeddon of the kind we as humans have only read in religious scripture.
There’s been a few rabbitgeddons. As a kid I recall the nearby UK hillsides appearing snow-covered in July, due to the number of rabbit bones after they were were hit by myxomatosis. decade or so later, all back again. Another event I witnessed was the gassing of the disused gas works site at St Ebbes Oxford, to get rid of them. All the pipes blocked and sealed, gas pumped in. Three days later, hop hop hop ….
A more interesting study would be why the other members of Lagomorpha manage to survive at all.
That is anti-science. It is the undisputed consensus that we will find ourselves up to our asses in alligators.
based jointly on subjective expert evaluation and objective model evaluation statistics.
Wow. Subjective evaluation AND and an objective model. What could go wrong with that?
I’d wager they had joint inputs frequently and spent much time talking to the rabbits about this to have come up with such a ‘profoundly grounded’ prediction.
You mean they didn’t have to burrow for one?
I know on thing for certain in my life I have lived or been near four distinct climates, Northern tall grass prairie, short grass prairie, northern forest and the Mojave desert, funny the cottontail rabbit is in all, the one in the hotter climate have larger ears. They seamed to have adopted well to a variety or climates. Oh by the way the jack rabbit occupies the same range excluding the north eastern forest. What kind of moron are getting collage degrees now days and what in the Sam he!! are the looking at?
Just for fun, I looked at the Wikipedia entry for the North American Eastern Cottontail rabbit. Here is what it says. Seems the little guys are doing just fine and spreading.
“The eastern cottontail can be found in meadows and shrubby areas in the eastern and south-central United States, southern Canada, eastern Mexico, Central America and northernmost South America. It is abundant in Midwest North America, and has been found in New Mexico and Arizona. Its range expanded north as forests were cleared by settlers.[3] Originally, it was not found in New England, but it has been introduced there and now competes for habitat there with the native New England cottontail. It has also been introduced into parts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.[4] In the mid-1960s, the Eastern cottontail was introduced to Cuba, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Barbados, Bahamas, Haiti, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Saint Croix and northern Italy, where it displayed a rapid territorial expansion and increase in population density”
This year they have invaded adelaide hills south australia suburbs in droves, and our backyard as well.
They thrive all over Australia from hot desert to cold mountains. Do these people actually have a clue what they are talking about!!!
I saw news footage from the 50s I think where Australian farmers had built fences to keep out a literal carpet of rabbits.
Dr Bill Mollison of Permaculture fame used to be a rabbit catcher. He was paid a 1/4 of a sheep per week and all the rabbits he could catch. He said he could carry 200 traps so that is what he got per day.
The farms were 6-10,000 acres or more and had rabbit densities of 6000 rabbits per acre. Given that they were a non-native species from a much colder, wetter climate we can assume the genetic endowment stands them in good stead to survive just about anywhere.
The climate catastrophe business is hopping, for the bunny huggers!
I think Bugs Bunny can provide the best peer review of this paper:
https://youtu.be/SSZ1h-bydS4
Given that rabbits are famous for breeding like … well, like rabbits, it’s going to take an awful lot of climate change to stop ’em. Colour me unworried.
Every time you start your car a kitten dies!
[Snip. Persona non grata. ~mod.]
Why don’t the Australians just eat them? Isn’t that how the mega-fauna were wiped out?
If they don’t want to eat them, why not convert them into dog food and cat food?
If they haven’t got enough dogs and cats, why not export the dog and cat food?
(Only partly in jest.)
In WW2 my grandpa used to go rabbit hunting to feed my mum and the rest of the family. Hunting rabbits can be surprisingly tricky. Some people use shotguns, but then you’ve got to pick all the pellets out. My grandpa used to use a .22, but hitting a rabbit in the lethal zone with a .22 takes a lot of skill, and if you don’t hit the rabbit in a instant kill spot, it runs off and hides. If you use a more powerful round, such as a 303/22, the rabbit simply explodes.
I guess you could snare rabbits, but I’ve never had much luck with snares. My grandpa tried to teach me, but I guess its not one of my talents :-).
Rabbit meat is surprisingly difficult to buy in a shop. A lot of Australians look down on rabbit meat, kind of like the way you would feel about eating rat meat, but roast rabbit can be absolutely delicious.
In Australia during the Great Depression of the 1930’s rabbits were called “underground mutton” as many families had to subsist on little more than rabbit meat.
In the great drought of the very late 1800’s and into the 1900’s whole areas of native Mallees and trees were killed by the rabbits which were by then in plague numbers in Australia. They stripped the bark off the trees to get at the moisture under the bark and dug burrows down and around the tree roots where they stripped the bark off the roots to get at the moisture thereby killing the trees.
As a boy before the introduction of the Myxo virus I have seen tens of acres of newly emerged crop just being mown down by a huge grey mass of rabbits roaming across the paddocks.
About 80 kilometres north of where I am located in western Victoria there is a memorial to one of the considerable number of rabbit proof fences, which weren’t, that were erected around the turn of the century to try and hold the rabbit infestations at bay and out of Australia’s productive crop land.
If climate change forces the rabbit to migrate down into the Great southern Ocean along with foxes, the next to worst predator of Australian native wild life, the feral cat being the most destructive, plus cane toads, mice, rats, European house sparrows, Starlings, Indian mynahs, Black Birds which gardeners hate plus quite number more, there will be great rejoicing across Australia’s rural areas and within wild life organisations.
All of those above species are introduced species that turned into major pests which has led to the collapse in the populations of some Australian species of birds and small animals.
Some images of the estimated 600 million Australian plague rabbits before the myxo virus was introduced in 1950, just for those who suggest that we should eat them or kill them for pet food to reduce their numbers.
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en-AU&q=australian+rabbit+plagues&gbv=2&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=GSUyVfqkB6TOmwXJyoH4Bg&ved=0CB4QsAQ&tbm=isch
The researchers who came up with that rabbit crap should be confined and condemned to live on rabbit stew, fried rabbit, cooked rabbit, baked rabbit, and rabbit done over as rabbit derivatives until they recant and withdraw such a miserable misleading utterly wrong piece of what today increasingly is being passed off as some sort of pseudo category science.
I figure it would take them about a week to fortnight maximum to have a serious rethink on their so called research and decide that all the rabbits in the world and thats a hell of a lot, weren’t really worth the trouble .
The butcher down the block sells rabbit (etc., etc.). They’ve been in business over a century.
The current owner (ancestor of the original) knows all too well about conditions back then:
They are famous for sausage. The father never reveals the old recipe. It is up to the son of each generation to come up with a new recipe. The tradition is both impressive and — if you know your history — amusingly appropriate.
I’ve seen them make hamburger. Wonderful, fresh cuts go into the grinder, and they don’t do the fat-added thing (burgers are generally ~30% added fat), instead they trim it all off. There is hardly a drop of fat left on the skillet.
Humans have been eating rabbits whenever they could catch them for, let’s say, 2 million years. It was probably a lot tougher in the wooden spear days, but we would have found a way.
Unlike any other meat, eating ONLY rabbit meat will kill you!
@Patrick: Not true; over-consumption of any meat will lead to protein poisoning. Protein alone does not provide sufficient Calories to survive on, and rabbit is the leanest wild meat to be found; but you can get protein poisoning from trying to subsist on other game muscle meat alone.
While death is rare, (My comment was a little tongue-in-cheek) it can happen, when eating lean protien like rabbit (And caribu) for long periods of time. Kidneys will start to shutdown as they fail to process the by-products of that protien, leading to protien poisoning, as you say, to give the condition it’s propper name. But the main issue with rabbit is the lack of fat on the animal and the human body needs fat to survive, or as is refered to a “balanced diet”.
Frederick Colbourne
“Why don’t the Australians just eat them? Isn’t that how the mega-fauna were wiped out?
The South Sydney Rugby League team is known as the “Rabbitohs” – for just that reason – surviving on rabbits during the depression.
Frankly, if climate change could drive away those eating my vegetables and the bark off my fruit trees – i would be all for it!
Cheers
What a wonderful thing that CO2 is. Down my way rabbits are a hated national pest.
This is all part of a vast conspiracy. It’s amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes…
Its all about faulty models similar to the fear mongering that Audubon has been pushing. The Moritz paper these folks touted only had one pika observation. just as many mammals moved downslope as moved upslope. The POcket mouse moved upslope because fires created new chapparal habitat that it prefers, More widespread studies found that 19% of USA pika have been found at lower elevations than historical records reported and lower than models predicted. Climate Horror Stories That Wont Die: The Case of the Pika (Stewart, 2015). http://landscapesandcycles.net/pika-not-endangered-its-fear-mongering-.html
Forget about the rabbits…. take a look at the cockroach, that was introduced too into Australia.
If you think rabbits are hard to kill, try purging a house infected with roaches!
OMG, I just admitted to murdering cockroaches. Is PETA now going to team up with the Global Warming idiots?
OMG, I just admitted to murdering cockroaches. Is PETA now going to team up with the Global Warming idiots?
Well, it is a declared war. And the roaches will in in the end, anyway.
Thanks berenyi !! These guys were the absolute best! They must had a blast doing all their skits and movies over the years. They never ever get old to me. ( as far as bunnies are concerned ? Tastes like chicken but these days it is hard (if not impossible) to find any. There was a “wild” rabbit problem in our area a few years ago, the solution was to trap them and “euthanize” them but that turned them useless for consumption. Should have been used to help the homeless and or low income families. Our planet is upside down inside out!
I knew if I read through the comments long enough this one would appear. Always funny.
Thanks.
Rabbits are herbivores, which means higher CO2 levels have already increased plant growth by roughly 20%, and at 560ppm, there be 50% more plant growth.
The 0.2C~0.3C of CO2 induced warming since 1900 has also extended extended the duration of yearly edible plant availability and has made winters less severe,
If anything, fossil fuel impoverished countries have been forced to consume forests for fuel, which has had devasting effects on rabbit habitats.
What’s up, Doc????
As Australia is one of the fastest changing environments in the world and it will suffer the most from raising temperatures and megadroughts introduced by the global climate change, it is considered very likely (expert evaluation) that lagomorphs will become severely threatened in the southern Australia. We need to act now to save them. More green peas for rabbits!
The authors of this thread’s study were quite successful in their efforts. They were paid to tell a scary story and they did.
Cottontails on the Osage tall grass prairie have more to eat than the outback bunnies, but their numbers are kept in check by Coyotes, Red tails and boys with .22s. The only times I’ve seen them have a population boom were during the bad drought of the 50’s when the Coyote and hawk populations suffered and again during the 60’s when a local rancher famously took up hunting the ‘yotes from a plane for a time, and suppressed the song dogs for miles around.
I suppose that we might soon have another local rabbit resurgence, because “they” are putting up those infernal windgens all over the place, so the local raptors are going to be thinned out (but cats kill birds, so it’s ok.)