Biologists at Washington University are trying to predict the effect global warming will have on plant and animal species. To do this, they are exploring how species still alive today survived global warming at the end of the Pleistocene.
Brad Oberle, a doctoral candidate in biology in Arts & Sciences, is writing his dissertation about the post-Pleistocene history of three species of “shootingstars” (Dodecatheon).
Scientists have gone back and forth on whether two types of shootingstar, the French’s and the jeweled, are actually different species from the more common Mead’s shootingstar.
This means organisms can successfully change to fit a new climate by adapting within the species or becoming a new one.
Both species are considered unusual because they inhabit cold, rocky climates.
Oberle found that one of the species, the French’s shootingstar, was actually the same as the Mead’s species, and that the other, the jeweled shootingstar, was its own species.
This means organisms can successfully change to fit a new climate by adapting within the species or becoming a new one.
“As is typical of science,” says Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, Oberle’s dissertation adviser and his co-author, “the result was mixed. Some species responded to warming by migrating, but other populations apparently adapted in place.”
Oberle and Schaal’s results suggest that the two rare “species” of shootingstar in the eastern United States should be managed differently. The jeweled shootingstar is much more vulnerable to climate change because there is less variance within its own species.
For more, visit http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/22098.aspx.