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.
I was at my chiropractor the other day and I paid her. Now, it’s always a ritual when I pay her. I write the check, and before I hand it over I hold the check (obviously, because I haven’t handed it over so it’d still be in my hand, wouldn’t it?), and go up and down on the countertop with it as if it’s bouncing (unfortunately one time it genuinely did). And each time my hand landed on the countertop I said “boing.” So it was “boing … boing …boing.” She snatches the check away.
Well, the rabbit picture in this post reminded me of that. Rabbits jump and bounce around a lot. And, while bouncing and boinging can be the same thing, sometimes they’re not. In fact, with rabbits they’re not the same thing at all. But there’s no denying that rabbits still do an awful lot of boinging. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the phrase, “they breed like rabbits.”
Now, there’s no denying that climate change research does an awful lot of the rabbit kind of boinging. After all, climate change research ‘breeds like rabbits.’ Which is why it has gone so ludicrously far as to actually research climate change in connection to rabbits. (Perhaps it could go so far as to research climate change impact on Peter Pan?)
It’s not uncommon for some species to multiply so much so that they overrun their environment. Despite all the boinging they do rabbits haven’t done that. But I suspect climate change research will.
And, despite all the boinging they do rabbits don’t boing us. However, the policy changes advocated by climate scientists will most definitely boing us (insert another word for ‘boing’ here if you so desire).
It’s very unfortunate that the taxpayers can’t take the checks paying for this research and go…
…boing…boing…boing…boing…boing…boing…boing…boing…
In my neck of the woods the rabbit population is tightly controlled by roaming packs of coyotes. One year you won’t see many rabbits but a lot of coyotes and the following year not so many coyotes and a few years later the rabbits are back eventually followed by the coyotes. Funny how global warming works in cycles.
This past couple weeks we’ve been seeing tons of pesky wabbits in our back wood lot. Start counting down, in any second the foxes will arrive … that’s funny that a bunch of biologists have to come up with odd speculation that claims that a species, that seems to thrive, absent predators, in environments that range from -20F to +80F, would be impacted by a 1 or 2 degree change in global temperature.
Many rabbit species have a 3 year wax/wane population cycle with varying explanations, keyed to food, disease and predators. Rabbits are the universal food for carnivores.
be vewwy quiet evweyybody.
“We’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan.”… basically some people expect, want and even demand the worst. Anything else causes a major depressive incident. We’ll call them climate scientists, for now.
Eli thinks this research is flawed.
Of the opinion, that tripe like this is symptomatic of the post-secondary race to the bottom. Undergraduate degrees are becoming increasingly shallow and superficial in intellectual content, leading to post-graduates equally so, leading to intellectually soft tenureds as well. Consequently, finding grad student research topics is apparently devolving into cruising first year high school textbooks looking for a idea the grad student could actually turn into a paper their prof would be able to read. /sarcnotreally
My father grew up on a working farm, was in the 101st Airborne, and when WWII ended he worked on his biology degree. He went on to a substantial career in both Department of Interior, in academics, and in our own family business, raising corn, soybeans, and mixed-breed beef, a lot of Angus-Herford crosses which made for a very tasty Porterhouse. By the 1980’s he was concerned about “dumb-ass-city-kids.” He never believed that people from cities were inherently limited, just that many of their connections to real nuts-and-bolts stuff was diminished to the point that they couldn’t make the common sense distinctions that allowed them to sort through a subject matter and link the implications of principle and theory to everyday activity. Subsequently, there is a growing tendency to build Rube Goldberg Machines to deal with problems that are inherently simple, and there are simplistic prescriptions for problems that are inherently complex. I think it’s similar to what Veblen called “trained incapacity,” but maybe more severe, because, as you point out, it’s being “concentrated” by dysfunction in the education hierarchy.
Decades ago, I did my undergraduate (in Biology) at a university with a very high standard for theoretical study in the related disciplines. Class sizes were small in the upper years in most disciplines – as few as 8, which meant that in the course of the year, you REALLY got deep into stuff. I stuck around for an additional year taking even more advanced course work before leaving with my degree. I went from there to another college to do work and study (ok, and chase a girlfriend…) in a specialist field, and while there, took even more coursework, since my theoretical basis was very strong but my local knowledge was weak. The second college was strong on local technical relevance, but as it turned out, extremely weak on the theoretical side. I was turning in papers that profs had to work at to wrap their heads around (this college tended to hire its own graduates for faculty, whereas my first school was extremely cosmopolitan). There was no comparison to the theoretical training received from my first school. The second college is IMO, more representative of the milieu of colleges as I’ve understood them over the decades. The research products hitting the streets seem to bear this out.
Kudos and thanks to your Father for his service. I am glad you are proud of him, he sounds to be a wonderful common sense man; as many farmers are.
Rabbits do quite well here in central Canada where the temperature ranges from -40C to +40C
The pudgy rabbits in my yard are endangered by the much smaller, but way toothier and determined long-tailed weasels.
We often see foxes, bobcats and coyotes here in the river bluffs. Still plenty of cottontails for all.
Some day soon, global warming will cause us to lose a few letters from the Alphabet or even a few planets from the Solar System. The entire tri-galaxy area is at risk. This was simulated, for the first time, in 12 highly complex climate models. Professor Putz said “Our results show that many aspects of the universe never considered before are, indeed, under threat from rising CO2 levels although more study is required.” Dr. Putz’ team is going to focus on parallel universes next and he further noted that the letter Z could be the first letter to go which, of course, would impact him personally.
In similar work, at the North Brooklyn Institute for Perfunctory Thinking, there’s a growing belief that the heat-pressure gradients at the edge of the solar system are coming under more stress due to global warming. This puts the entire space-time continuum at risk of catastrophic failure, and the entire universe could be blown to smithereens. This has lead to an RFP from the NRDC for the development of a state of the art device to accurately measure a smithereen.
Bill Illis
“Some day soon, global warming will cause us to lose a few letters from the Alphabet …”
:o) Yup. I hear the missin_ le__ers are hidin_ in the dep_hs of the ocean and i_’s a _raves_y we can’_ find _hem.
https://youtu.be/FGK8IC-bGnU
This rabbit article is a great demonstration that a tragic loss of intellectual abilities is perhaps the worst impact of fanatical belief in the climate consensus.
The authors are demonstrating how adaptable life can be. The authors are writing such crap in order to survive in the scientific community. The very existence of this paper actually refutes its findings.
hunter, I am sure the tragic loss of human intellectual abilities is down to the effects of climate change!
“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 ….”
How has this type of corporate speaking come to invade what should be a naturalists subject? This selection of words betrays this persons lack of any broad experience of life in general.
In London I can easily see tropical Rose Ringed Parakeets, They have successfully colonised in a place that is nothing like there natural home. But in London there is food and relative protection from the elements. I have also seen turtles sunbathing in a London park. Living wild in the UK we have Tasmanian Wallabies, Chinese Mitten Crabs, American Signal Cray Fish, South American Coypu, American Grey Squirrel, two separate colonies of scorpion and I haven’t included the extraordinary range of plants and trees from all continents and climates.
How on Earth does one distinguish between a natural movement of species when any such observation is surely swamped by the huge human assisted movement of all varieties of flora and fauna?
Rabbits are delicious They taste much better than cat. They look the same when skinned but don’t be fooled
I asked my Grandmother why the butcher’s shop had rabbits hanging up and they still had their ears on. She replied that butchers were required to leave the ears on so that customers could be certain they weren’t being sold cat. Croydon round about 1940.
Rabbit does provide a good meal. Seems a little tastier than baby seals, polar bear cubs, bald eagles and condors, neighborhood dogs and house cats.
Another “Given global warming, . . . .” study.
“Claim: Rabbits will be impacted by climate change”
First, all of us will be impacted by a changing climate. Heck, most of us are impacted by annual seasonal changes. Even a quick change from sunny to rain can be impactful. Geez.
Were those rabbits impacted by the changing climate from 1850 to 1950, or are they only being impacted by “Climate change during the past five decades…”?
How, exactly, does that work?
JohnWho,
Please stop clouding the issue with logical and sensible questions. It jeopardizes the next round of grant applications and puts the peer reviewers in a bad light. Thank you ;o)
My bad.
Sorry.
Of course, their starting assumption that we have been warming for 50 years, begs that it be mentioned that we were cooling 50 years ago, only warmed really from 1978 to 1988 and have not warmed significantly since 1988, with mild to active cooling since 2002. So, how can anything their warming climate models predict have anything to do with the real world? They simply cannot.
Also, their ingenuous idea that species behavior or patterns can predict future climate changes makes mammals clairvoyant, which they are not. Species are reactive, not proactive, a real dumb idea for someone who pretends to be doing useful”research.”
Another exercise in wasted time and money. Sigh.
Not really higley7.
Out my window, right now, I see an environmentalist replacing the image on a bill board of a Polar Bear with a rabbit.
Oh, wait – that’s Josh working on his next cartoon!
Never mind.
LOL
Actually rabbits are pro-actively pre-adapting to climate change. Utilizing techniques similar to the ones developed by Mario Capecchi, to turn genes on and off in mice, the Rabbits are able to pre-adapt to be ready for future changes. What many of us don’t know is that there will be many rabbit representatives at the upcoming conference in Paris, they need to know the exact steps taken to battle AGW so that their gene modification regimen can be perfectly tuned to the future. They will also be discussing their plans for total world domination, which involves the development of an opposing thumb, (toe), and extensive firearms training to combat potential predators.
Yes, AGW will lead to total world domination by rabbits
Mark,
Worse yet, the cockroaches and rabbits are in cahoots
I, for one, welcome our new Furry and Scurry Overlords.
O.M.G. I’m so startled right now.
I don’t want my children’s children to be enslaved by their rabbit overlords.
Why do they not tell you about this in National Geographic?
This is supposed to be bad news?
I’m from New Zealand. As far as we are concerned, “impacted” doesn’t go far enough. Tell us climate change will exterminate the little pests and we’ll all celebrate.
The study shows how money turns scientists into prostitutes.
Food supply and predators, not temperature drives populations. All species except post industrial humans turn excess food into reproduction.
A few degrees temperature change over many decades will have no effect on animals able to cope with much larger temperature changes over a matter of hours.
The fawning over climate change shows the effects of dangling grant money over the desired conclusion.
White Rabbit
Crank it !!
I see a Josh cartoon. Scientists in white lab coats standing in front of Monty Hall being asked to choose one of three doors. Uncle Sam holding a bag of money over one of the doors.
When and how did rabbits get a lobby?
After they build the underground parking.
Actually rabbits invaded Australia in the distant past. Being very adaptive animals, they responded to the occasional droughts – sometimes 10 years long – by developing pouches to keep the young rabbits in until the drought ended. This meant that they had to grow bigger and bigger as the young grew. Eventually they grew till they were about 10 ft high and weighed up to 230 kg! The aborigines were asked what they were called. Unfortunately the aborigines could not understand English, and they replied “I can’t understand what you are saying.” In the local language this was “K’an’ga roo.” Ever since they have been called ‘Kangaroos’. See the Wikipaedia article:
“Procoptodon goliah (the giant short-faced kangaroo) is the largest kangaroo to have ever lived. It grew 2–3 metres (7–10 feet) tall, and weighed up to 230 kilograms. It had a flat shortened face with jaw and teeth adapted for chewing tough semi-arid vegetation, and forward-looking eyes providing stereoscopic vision.”
As they were so big the Goliah Kangaroos were rather slow moving, and while they could easily kill Australian lions (see Wikipaedia article on Australian megafauna) by kicking them, the largest succumbed to the Aborigines when they invaded Australia. Only the smaller ones are left, with
Red Kangaroos “A large male can be 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) tall and weigh 90 kg (200 lb).” They infest gold courses in Canberra, where the fairways are watered to encourage the grass, and the kangaroos are used to mow the grass to keep it short for golfers.
(This comment was not written on April 1, though that may have been appropriate.)
Actually, the kangaroos are kept at Defence sites to intercept suicide bombers in case of terrorist attacks.
I don’t know what rabbit species we received in Australia but they are certainly prolific breeders and manage to put up with plus 40C summer temperatures with ease.
24 rabbits were introduced in 1859.
By 1869 2 million a year were being harvested without denting the population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia
Western Australia built a 1800km long fence to keep them out but it didn’t work
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit-proof_fence
Any suggestion that slightly elevated temperatures are going to put rabbits at risk is simply laughable
Yay Greg… They breed like….
er…
rabbits!
And how exactly are they going to get to the poles when all the ice has melted?
Rabbits breed like climate scientists.
And I forget..
A novel by Russell Braddon………..Year of the Angry Rabbit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Angry_Rabbit
Australia is overrun by giant mutant rabbits
Good… It’s about time the “poles” got something back from the UK anyway!
Reblogged this on Rnm101's Blog and commented:
What utter blx!