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https://asknature.org/

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How does nature ...
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Humanity faces many challenges. Nature holds
solutions. To discover them, all we have to do is
ask. Begin your search here, or explore featured
content below to learn from other species'
successful strategies and adaptations.

Youth Design Challenge Gallery

Working with groups made me feel like I made an impact on the world. Youth Design Challenge Participant

The 2023-2024 Youth Design Challenge is here! Once again, students around the world will learn to use biomimicry to address some of the biggest environmental challenges we face. Learn more and view winners' projects from 2018 to the present.

Whether it is tool use among chimpanzees or song practice among zebra finches, the process of perfecting the craft lies in diligent practice. Karuna Skariah Educator

Education isn't just about memorization, but practicing into mastery. Looking to other species, we see that long-term success is all about incorporating new knowledge into your very being.

When materials that comprise living systems are subjected to repeated loads, they can weaken over time. This is called fatigue and it can lead to cracks and eventually failure. However, fatigue doesn't occur just anywhere on a material; the cracks usually start in areas subjected to elevated local stresses. Therefore, living systems often employ shapes, materials, and/or smooth transitions to decrease the potential for fatigue. An example of using shape is found in brown algae, an intertidal seaweed. Rather than being bent by the constant flow forces of waves and currents, its shape causes it to be pulled. This reduces stress by roughly 800 times compared to another species that bends with the flow, ultimately reducing structural fatigue.

Featured Pages for October 2023

Enjoy a hand-picked selection of pages, including seasonally themed, recently updated, or newly added Biological Strategies, Innovations, and more.

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Innovation Inspired by Nature - AskNature

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We love treehouses here at Inhabitat and are enamored with eco-architect Mitchell Joachim's visionary ideas about how to grow living treehouses from ficus molded around frame structures. We've covered these playful architectural ideas before on Inhabitat, but now we have a video from Mitchell Joachim explaining the details of how they work. Joachim does better justice to his imaginative ecological designs than we are able to do in a mere post, so if you have any interest in living treehouses (and we know you do), check out the video above.

As part of the ecological architecture nonprofit Terreform, Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden, and Javier Arbona designed this living treehouse in which the dwelling itself merges with its environment and nourishes its inhabitants. Fab Tree Hab dissolves our conventional concept of home and establishes a new symbiosis between the house and its surrounding ecosystem.

In order to build the arboreal frame, the designers utilize "pleaching" - a gardening technique in which tree branches are woven together to form living archways. Trees such as Elm, Live Oak, and Dogwood bear the heavier loads, while vines, branches, and plants form a lattice for the walls and roof of the house. The interior structure is made of cob (clay and straw), a tried-and-true green building approach that lends itself to customized shaping of walls and ceilings.

The trees that form the frame and the plants that grow on the external walls are meant to provide sustenance for the inhabitants and other living creatures who interact with the structure. On this level, the designers aim to demonstrate that natural building materials, when utilized in their living state, can create a "superstructure" that is biologically pure and contains no unknown substances. They point out that new building materials, even those that champion sustainability, are nevertheless industrially manufactured and contain components that are not fully understood in terms of their long-term impact.
+ Terreform Video (45 Minutes - Full Video)
+ Terreform's Living Treehouse: Fab Tree Hab + Top Ten Treehouses
+ Terreform's Soft Car

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We love treehouses here at Inhabitat and are enamored with eco-architect Mitchell Joachim's visionary ideas about how to grow living treehouses from ficus molded around frame structures. We've covered these playful architectural ideas before on Inhabitat, but now we have a video from Mitchell Joachim explaining the details of how they work.

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Children born in high-income countries will experience twice as many extreme climate events as their grandparents, new research suggests.

But for children in low-income countries, it will be worse. They will see three times as many, say researchers at the University of Brussels.

The BBC's population reporter Stephanie Hegarty has been looking at how climate change is already making poverty worse.
Produced and edited by: Myles Burke Executive Producer: Claire Williams

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How climate change makes inequality worse

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Children born in high-income countries will experience twice as many extreme climate events as their grandparents, new research suggests. But for children in low-income countries, it will be worse. They will see three times as many, say researchers at the University of Brussels.

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URBAN PLANNING MORE SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL??

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How can the most endangered ecosystem in the world be saved?

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On a sunny, sultry summer day, Joe Blastick, a land steward with The Nature Conservancy, scans the hilly pastures north of Clear Lake, South Dakota, and rattles off the names of plants he sees. Silver leaf scurf pea, purple prairie clover, green needle grass, and dozens of others blend into a cacophony of color and texture. Monarch and regal fritillary butterflies sample their nectar; meadowlarks and eastern kingbirds glide through the thick afternoon air.

As impressive as the visible display is, the real action here is underground. Roots of grasses and other prairie perennials may descend 10 feet into the soil. Powered by the sun, these grasslands have for millennia pulled carbon out of the air and stashed it deep in the dirt. Grasslands store about a third of the world's land-based carbon: They are one of nature's original climate solutions.

Ninety-two-year-old Herb Hamann, who owns these pastures, has carefully managed his 500-head cattle herd to make sure this 5,000-acre patch of prairie thrives. "I always loved grass," Hamann says during my visit to his rustic farmhouse. Even through a severe drought this summer, his land stayed green and the cattle stayed fed. "In a tough year like this, I don't have to worry," Hamann says.

Hamann has put his land in a conservation easement designed to protect it forever. But he's an increasingly rare specimen in this part of the world. Many other grasslands in the region, identified by conservationists like Blastick as a critical stronghold for imperiled plant, insect, and bird species, have in the past few decades given way to monocultures of two crops that the world can't seem to get enough of: corn and soybeans.

A longer growing season, advanced seed varieties, and new farming technologies have all contributed to the Corn Belt's incursion into the Great Plains. But the most important drivers, experts say, are economics and politics. A booming global market for commodity crops is being reinforced by two massive U.S. federal incentives: the ethanol mandate, which directs more than 100 million tons of corn annually to refineries that produce the gasoline additive, and crop insurance subsidies, which protect growers from financial losses.

The relentless expansion of corn and soy farming poses a conundrum for the Biden administration. The president wants to cut U.S. agriculture's net carbon emissions to zero-a tall order for a sector that currently puts more greenhouse gases in the air than 150 million cars and accounts for more than 10 percent of the country's total emissions. Biden has also promised to conserve 30 percent of the nation's land in a bid to protect biodiversity. Given that habitat for many threatened species is on private land, the government needs to not only create parks and preserves, but also engage farmers and ranchers in conservation.

Nowhere is that more true than the Plains. Every time a grassland is plowed or sprayed with herbicide and planted in crops, hundreds of deep-rooted perennial plants that can suck carbon into the soil and keep it there are wiped out. A 2019 study led by Tyler Lark, an agricultural researcher at the University of Wisconsin, estimated that tillage for cropland expansion put as much carbon dioxide into the air annually as 31 million cars. A 2018 study, led by The Nature Conservancy, found that in the U.S., conserving grasslands could prevent almost three times as much carbon emission as conserving forests.

The loss of the Amazon rainforest may get the headlines, but grasslands are even more imperiled, experts say. Roughly half of all temperate grasslands worldwide have been lost, compared to less than 20 percent of the Amazon. In 2019 alone, 2.6 million acres of North American grasslands were plowed under, according to a World Wildlife Fund report.

Grasslands, says Lark, "really are the most endangered ecosystem in the world."

They took millennia to build

Fifteen thousand years ago, the northern Plains were buried under a massive ice sheet. When the ice retreated, a rich mix of plants moved into the region, which stretches from northern Iowa and western Minnesota across the Dakotas into Montana and Canada. Bison roamed the prairies in huge herds, chomping the tops of plants, fertilizing the soil with their manure and moving on. The plants grew back, all the while pulling in carbon and shuttling up to 80 percent of it to their roots, which pushed deep underground, building spectacularly rich soil.

When Europeans arrived, disaster struck in the form of the plow. Iowa and surrounding states, with a relatively mild climate, were transformed into the Corn Belt and have virtually no native prairie left. The northern Plains, with a harsher climate and thinner soils, escaped total conversion. While only 7 percent of northern grasslands are formally protected, more than two-thirds have remained intact, a sort of accidental nature preserve.

That reality is rapidly shifting, however. Today's farmers can avoid the backbreaking sod busting of yesteryear by simply spraying herbicide and drilling in seeds. Those seeds have been customized for the Plains' limited growing season and cold, dry climate.

When crop prices spiked, starting in the mid-2000s, U.S. farmers responded. Between 2008 and 2016, they converted more than 10 million acres of grasslands-a combined area nearly the size of West Virginia-to crop fields. The northern Plains were hit the hardest. Prices eventually receded, but earlier this year corn reached $7.70 a bushel and soybeans topped $16 a bushel, just a hair off their historic peaks. Corn acreage is up 2 percent in 2021, to 92.7 million acres. Soybean acreage jumped, on a percentage basis, more than twice that.

Ground zero for conversion of grass to crops is the Prairie Potholes region, a Texas-sized expanse of rolling hills, flat land and shallow lakes extending from northern Iowa through the Dakotas into Canada. Fully half of North America's ducks and other waterfowl are born in this region, and they need grasslands for their nests. The Potholes also are home to hundreds of plant and insect species, many of which are in decline. The Dakota skipper butterfly, for example, was recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, while the range of the regal fritillary butterfly, which once extended to Maine, has shrunk to prairie remnants mostly west of the Mississippi River.

Perhaps no animal illustrates the impact of grasslands' decline more than birds. A 2019 study of bird decline singled out grassland birds as the most imperiled group in the country, with a more than 50 percent drop in overall population since 1970, and three in four species in decline. Birds that feed or nest only in grasslands include iconic species like the upland sandpiper, eastern meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, and the bobolink.

A drive around eastern South Dakota makes clear the conservation challenge. Nearly all the land is privately owned, and it is home to essentially two things: cows and crops. While few people broadcast that they're plowing up prairie, the evidence is abundant, if you know where to look.

Bruce Toay, a Ducks Unlimited conservation program manager based in Ipswich, South Dakota, drives me past 500 acres of corn planted on what had until this year been native prairie used to graze cows. Toay points out the fence, still in good condition. Brown-and-green chunks of busted-up sod are scattered around the field edges.

"It's an ongoing battle. We're constantly losing grasslands," says Toay. "If we lose some every year, eventually we won't have any left."

Are cows the answer?

To Lyle Perman, the way to keep grass "right side up" and crops at bay is simple: more cows. Perman's 10,000-acre ranch, folded into the hills east of the Missouri River, is about as remote as it gets. Like Hamann,Perman practices a brand of agriculture inspired by the ancient symbiosis between bison and the prairie.

In Perman's rotational grazing system, hundreds of cows at a time graze a fenced-in pasture intensely but briefly. Sheep are then brought in to munch whatever cows don't eat. Animals are then kept off the grass for a year, allowing plants to regrow.

"The keystone species in this whole climate-change discussion is the cow," says Perman. "You take the cow off the landscape, what do you suppose happens to the prairies and the grasslands?"

After a hearty breakfast at Perman's house, he and I hop on a four-wheeler for a bumpy ride out to the pastures. A punishing drought has turned grass in the region a crackling brown, but Perman points out many of the same drought-tolerant native plants that grow at Hamann's places. His cowsmunch contentedly on a hillside. In a few days, he'll open a gate and usher the herd toward a new, ungrazed paddock, where plants are up to several feet tall. "You know what it's like on Black Friday when the store doors open?" he quips.

Perman's way of farming faces stiff challenges. It's hard work-the 66-year-old rancher told me he had already moved his herd, which numbers more than 1,000 cows, "at least a dozen times" since May-and ranchers are aging, often with no one to take over their farms. Beef consumption has steadily declined in the U.S. from its peak in the mid-1970s, and the government doesn't subsidize grass-fed cattle the way it does crop farming.

"There's much less of a safety net for raising cattle than there is for commodity crop production," says Martha Kauffman, managing director of the World Wildlife Fund's Northern Great Plains program.

For example, this year's drought is pushing hay and feed prices up, forcing many ranchers to sell off animals. Drought-stricken corn and soybean farmers won't feel the same pain, because nearly all of them buy federally subsidized crop insurance. The government spends more than $6 billion annually on crop insurance subsidies.

Perman would know, as he sells crop insurance, too. He launched the side business in 1985, in part so his son could take over the ranch and earn a living; the cows don't provide enough income for the two of them and their families. The insurance Perman sells, he says, creates an incentive to grow crops even in places where they shouldn't be-in soil that's too wet or too dry, for example, or too salty or steeply sloped.

After leaving Perman's ranch, I see the results from my drive along the long, straight roads north of Aberdeen, South Dakota. Field after field with anemic corn no more than a foot high, or shriveled soybeans, rise from salty white soil that until recently grew lush grasses.

The battle to save grasslands has forged unlikely alliances. Ranchers like Perman and conservationists like Toay agree that to conserve grasslands in places like the Prairie Potholes, cattle ranchers need better financial incentives. Ducks Unlimited, for example, helps ranchers take advantage of federal programs that help pay for fencing. The Audubon Society is supporting a new venture to market beef from cows that spend their lives on grass-as opposed to being fattened on corn at a feedlot-in hopes of preserving grassland bird habitat.

The goal is to make responsible cattle grazing as attractive and rewarding as growing crops. "If we negatively impact the livestock industry, we will lose more grassland," says Toay. "It's a pretty simple, direct relationship."

To be sure, cattle have plenty of detractors. Cows burp methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and in the tropics, forests are often cleared for pasture, making beef by some measures among the most climate-unfriendly foods available. But a growing body of research is revealing that not all beef should be lumped into the same climate bucket. Cows grazed in rotational systems like those employed by Perman and Hamann avoid deforestation and may emit less net greenhouse gas than those on feedlots, because grassland plants pull carbon out of the air and into the soil as they grow, offsetting emissions from the animals themselves. The exact balance depends on variables such as the local climate and how animals are managed, however, and scientists are still working out how to calculate the impact a particular cattle ranch has on the climate.

Rescuing grasslands requires Congress

In May, the Biden administration released a " progress report " detailing its plans to reduce agriculture's carbon footprint. In a major move that could aid grasslands, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) boosted both the maximum number of acres and the rates it offers for its Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to grow grass for 10 to 15 years on fields that previously grew crops. The USDA estimates the $2 billion-a-year program sequesters roughly nine million cars' worth of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

But there are caveats: If CRP land is later plowed, which much of it is, a lot of the stored carbon is lost. And as havens for biodiversity, fields of planted grass can't match native prairie that has never been plowed.

The USDA also expanded a relatively new program that pays ranchers to keep such prairie intact for 10 or 15 years. Perman, who has some land in the program, calls it "a step in the right direction." Bill Hohenstein, director of USDA's Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, hopes the department can also help launch private-sector carbon markets tailored for ranchers that would pay for carbon sequestered in grasslands.

In April, Biden announced a commitment to conserve 30 percent of U.S. land and ocean ecosystems by 2030. What exactly such a "30 by 30" effort would entail is still unclear. One of the government's primary grassland conservation tools thus far has been voluntary conservation easements, like the one Hamann has, under which landowners put land off limits to plowing in perpetuity in exchange for a one-time payment. Environmental groups are pushing a bill that would provide $350 million a year in new funding for easements and other incentives to keep grasslands intact.

The need for such biodiversity protections was underscored by a 2020 study by Lark and colleagues that found that between 2008 to 2016, new crop fields wiped out more than 200 million milkweed plants and destroyed some 138,000 potential waterfowl nesting sites.

Meanwhile, a fierce backlash to 30 by 30 has emerged among landowners in places like the Dakotas, many of whom don't want to involve the government in what happens on their land. Dru Tosel, a farmer near Appleton, Minnesota, is one of them.Tosel plowed up roughly 55 acres of grass about five years ago to plant corn, and says he did taxpayers a favor, because he now pays a higher tax rate on the land. He has no interest in taking government incentives to return crop fields to grass, which he views as a waste of valuable land.

"I'm even thinking of putting in my will ... you'll never put this land in CRP or another government program," Tosel says.

If grasslands are ultimately to be saved, advocates say, Congress will need to reform the programs that drive up crop prices. A bipartisan group of senators recently introduced a bill that could accomplish part of that by ending the ethanol mandate-a move that will be fiercely opposed by the agriculture industry. The crop insurance program, meanwhile, will probably get a hard look in the next Farm Bill, due in 2023.

Without such policy shifts, crops will likely continue to gain ground in their tug-of-war with grass, says Judge Jessop, project coordinator for the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition. "There's just more money in the agriculture side of things than there is in the grass side," he says. "I'm not against farmers. That's the game they're handed-and they're playing it well."
This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative news organization.

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How can the most endangered ecosystem in the world be saved?

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On a sunny, sultry summer day, Joe Blastick, a land steward with The Nature Conservancy, scans the hilly pastures north of Clear Lake, South Dakota, and rattles off the names of plants he sees. Silver leaf scurf pea, purple prairie clover, green needle grass, and dozens of others blend into a cacophony of color and texture.

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What is an indicator species?

An indicator species is an organism-bacteria, plant, or animal-that reflects the condition of the environment around it. They're often the first in their ecosystem to be affected by a particular environmental change, such as a warming climate, pollution, human development, and other environmental degradation. By monitoring changes in the behavior, physiology, or number of an indicator species, scientists can monitor the health of its whole environment.

Crayfish, for example, can indicate the quality of freshwater, because changes in water acidity are stressful to them. The health of corals can indicate trends such as seawater rise and sea temperature fluctuation, which in turn are signals of climate change. Peregrine falcons are an indicator of pesticides; DDT, for example, causes their eggshells to thin. Many native plants are indicators of the presence and impact of invasive species For instance, ash trees in the U.S. were the first decimated by invasive emerald ash borer beetles.

To be an effective indicator species-also called a bioindicator-a species should have some key characteristics. Its health should be a bellwether for the health of other species in the same ecosystem; a species that is uniquely vulnerable or struggling makes a poor bioindicator. And any changes it undergoes should be clear and measurable, acting as an early-warning system for broader change. Last, it should respond to change in a predictable way.

Notable indicator species

Amphibians such as frogs and toads are strong indicator species for pollution. They have permeable skin through which they absorb oxygen-and toxins. As a result, they're extremely sensitive to changes in the quality of air and water. They're often the first animals, for example, to be affected by pesticide use in or near their ecosystems. Many amphibian populations have plummeted around the world, while others have developed deformities such as extra legs because of pesticides.

Conversely, certain bacteria species thrive where toxins are present, making them bioindicators as well. An overabundance of bacteria can indicate the presence of a toxin in the same way that the absence of frogs does.

Northern spotted owls are a widely studied indicator species. Scientists look to them to get a sense of the overall health of old-growth forest ecosystems and to monitor the effects of human-caused habitat changes. Native to the Pacific Northwest, the owls make their nests in old tree cavities, broken treetops, and abandoned raptor nests, all found in the region's old-growth forests. But as forests have been cleared for logging, agriculture, and urban development, the owls have lost their nesting sites, and their populations have plummeted. They continue to decline by an average of almost 4 percent each year.

Their decline signals that other species in the forest are likely declining as well and that the forest-and the web of life that sustains it-have been degraded. Similarly, a population of thriving northern spotted owls indicates that an ecosystem is healthy and able to support an array of other plants and animals.

Pikas-small, furry mammals that look like short-eared rabbits-are perfectly adapted to living in harsh high-alpine habitats, which means that even the smallest changes to their environment affect them. That makes them good indicators of global warming.

Instead of hibernating to get through the winter, pikas take cover under rocky debris, relying on the insulation of heavy winter snowpack to keep their dens warm. In the 2000s, researchers began to notice declines in pika populations at lower elevations, especially in the driest parts of the western U.S. This was an alarm bell signaling the climate was warming: Over the past several decades, shorter winters and less snowfall have meant the snowpack melts earlier each spring, reducing the pikas' insulating blanket of snow cover. That has left them increasingly exposed to cold spring temperatures at a time when their food stores are depleted and their offspring, about the size of walnuts, are small and vulnerable. Some do not survive.

Indicator species vs. keystone species

Indicator species differ from keystone species, although some can be both. Keystone species are those that have a disproportionately large effect on their environments. They help maintain biodiversity, and there are no other species in the ecosystem that can serve their same function. Without them, their ecosystem would change dramatically or could even cease to exist. Beavers, for instance, are considered a keystone species. They build dams that create wetland habitats in which many other species thrive.

While keystone species are vital to sustaining their ecosystem, they may or may not be uniquely susceptible to environmental change-a key characteristic of indicator species. Some species, however, are both. The white ash tree, for example, may be considered an indicator species; hundreds of millions of ash trees have been killed by the invasive emerald ash borer. But white ash trees are also keystone species. They provide food and habitat to dozens of animal species and act as a sink for air pollutants.

Why indicator species matter

By studying indicator species, scientists can keep a finger on the pulse of an entire ecosystem's health without having to spread monitoring resources thin across multiple species and locations. The Colorado Pika Project, for example, comprises volunteers who gather data on pika populations across the state. This allows scientists not only to learn which populations of pikas are most at risk, but it also helps them protect pika populations and, crucially, their entire alpine ecosystems.

Monitoring indicator species can also better help scientists zero in on what change is occurring in an environment. For example, while a wetland ecosystem may show general signs that something is amiss, if scientists see that frog populations are plummeting, they'll know the problem may be pesticides.

Scientists, lawmakers, and public officials can also use the data collected from indicator species to implement conservation policies-such as protecting land and habitats, regulating development or chemical use, or passing laws-to reverse or prevent damage before it becomes too late.

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These animals offer key clues for environmental change

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Indicator species are often the first to be affected by change in an ecosystem. Studying these sensitive animals helps scientists detect the effects of climate change and pollution early.

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A group of little auks or dovekies (Alle alle) at their nesting site on a rocky hillside at Varsolbukta in Bellsund, which is a 20 km long sound and part of the Svalbard archipelago of Norway. Credit... Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images

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HURRICANE LIZARDS AND PLASTIC SQUID
The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change
By Thor Hanson

When I left Canada for the United States in 1987, I had never seen or heard a red-bellied woodpecker, which at that time was a rare vagrant in southern Ontario. Today, they are firmly established here, and I have encountered several since returning to Canada in 2018.

It's no mystery why red-bellied woodpeckers are advancing northward. They're responding to a warming planet. To which one might say: "Fine, good for them!" But in an interconnected world, where the fate of one species is inextricably linked to the fortune of another, rapid changes always carry consequences. At a time when the climate change discourse is focused mainly on its causes, its effects on weather and our so-far tepid efforts to address the problem, it's good to see a book on how animals and plants are responding and faring amid the flux.

Starving polar bears forced to swim as ice melts have become an evocative symbol of global warming. But as Thor Hanson reveals in "Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid," there are subtler, less noticed dramas playing out.

Thor Hanson Credit... Kathleen Ballard Photography

Take, for example, the so-called escalator to extinction, a phenomenon as sad as it is insidious. Temperature and moisture patterns change with elevation, as do the species who inhabit each terrain. On a heating planet, those animals and plants that have adapted to particular elevations are being forced to higher ground, until they reach the top and, having nowhere left to go, perish. Studies have documented this effect on birds, moths and tree seedlings, and it seems likely that other life forms, including mammals, reptiles and amphibians, are vulnerable to this upslope migration toward oblivion. With 25 percent to 85 percent of the world's species now in the process of relocating, one wonders whether the hottest regions on earth will become barren lands, devoid of any life, like the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, which covers somewhere around 7,000 square miles.

Despite the gravity of its subject, though, this is not a depressing book. An award-winning biologist and author whose earlier work has focused on bees, feathers, seeds and gorillas, Hanson is an affable guide and storyteller, with a knack for analogy, a sense of humor and the natural curiosity of a scientist. In a compact chemistry lesson using a jar of pickles and a lit match, he and his son, Noah, perform an experiment to demonstrate the power of carbon dioxide. On another occasion, he takes his hatchet to a dead pine in his yard to try to discover whether his tree is being attacked by destructive borer beetles.

Elsewhere, Hanson outlines carbon dioxide's omnipresence, its gradual subterranean conversion to fossil fuels (petroleum, coal, natural gas) and its much faster release into ecosystems when we burn those fuels. In the oceans, acidification corrodes and weakens the protective shells of tiny mollusks vital to marine food ecosystems, and sparks sensory confusion for fishes that rely on water chemistry for finding mates, meals, homes and avoiding predators. When coral reefs decline, this reduces not just food, but cover for reef denizens.

In this deteriorating world, it takes some evolutionary agility for a species to avoid losing its grip on life, sometimes literally. An experiment with anole lizards demonstrates rapid natural selection favoring feet and toes better able to hold onto twigs and branches during severe storms. The diminutive reptiles cling to a stick while being subjected to close-range blasts from a leaf blower. I don't imagine the anoles appreciated being subjected to near-hurricane-force winds (never mind the noise!), but I was pleased to see that they were all returned to the wild reportedly unharmed.

A green anole. Credit... Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images

If improving your grip isn't on your to-do list, perhaps changing your wardrobe is. In Finland, the once-rare brown tawny owl is now overtaking the more typical gray one, owing to declining snow cover. I was reminded of when, as a young child, my father explained to me how the pepper moths in London, which rely on camouflage to elude hungry birds, underwent a similar transformation from white to dark gray when the Industrial Revolution plastered buildings and trees with soot.

One of the core lessons here is that our climate emergency affects not just individual species but, inevitably, interspecies relationships. Witness the effects of changing climate on the interdependence of plants and birds. Consider the "timing mismatches" that occur with flowering plants. Nectar-rich flowers are hitting their peak blooming phase a week or more before hummingbirds arrive. Insect activity is also affected, with flocks of hungry swallows missing an expected insect hatch. It is only by careful population monitoring that we are likely to notice these shifts, such are the creeping effects of climate change.

Temperature, of course, isn't the only climatic variable at play: Some trees are moving south and west in pursuit of drifting moisture. Blue jays and other seed-caching birds facilitate the migration by carrying and burying seeds over long distances, some of which inevitably go unretrieved when a jay forgets or dies.

But how, Hanson wonders, does a plant outrun climate change when its prime seed distributor has gone? Joshua trees lost their most important long-distance seed disperser in the giant Shasta ground sloth, whose kind went extinct following the last ice age, probably because of human predation. Whereas the lumbering sloths could excrete Joshua seeds miles from where the fruits were eaten, today the Joshuas are left with pack rats and other small mammals, whose dispersal services amount to a measly six feet per year. (I'm hoping that history's most prodigious seed disperser, humankind, is atoning for past misdemeanors.)

Although there are plenty of species declines in these pages, there are also stories of flexibility and resilience. Nimble dovekies (a.k.a. "little auks"), small, plump arctic seabirds, are not only so far surviving, but also thriving, no longer having to fly as far to find their favored food - flourishing zooplankton made accessible by melting ice.

There were occasions when I was hoping for information that didn't materialize. It's fascinating to learn that elderberries have a more bear-friendly nutritional profile than salmon, and that Alaskan grizzly bears will abandon the salmon run to feast on these berries, which are now fruiting earlier. But I'd like to know how they sense when the time is right. Can they smell the berries from a distance, or perhaps see a blush of purple appearing on bushes upslope?

The grizzlies aren't the only ones after salmon. The author declares a passion for fishing. In doing so, he joins a sizable cadre of self-described animal-loving writers who nevertheless pursue a pastime that causes fear, pain and suffering in their quarry. There is now robust science demonstrating pain and emotion in all kinds of fishes, salmon included. The dissonance here is not just ethical but ecological. As Hanson explains, the native cutthroat trout he seeks is threatened by hybridization with rainbow trout, with which these streams have been stocked to serve the recreational demands of anglers.

Which brings us to Hanson's inspirational closing argument, that individual action drives much-needed policy change, not vice versa. While nobody can do everything, there is much that each of us can do (and not do), "tangible things like how we drive, shop, eat, travel, protest, vote," and even, he writes, "cut the grass." Amen.

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How the Animal World Is Adapting to Climate Change (Published 2021)

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Get started with R&D Solutions for Other Industries Knovel helps you solve complex engineering problems efficiently to minimize operational risks and enhance business performance. Discover Knovel ScienceDirect combines authoritative, full-text scientific and technical research with smart, intuitive functionality so engineers can stay informed and work more effectively and efficiently.

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