Understanding how birds respond to climate change is a critical area of research that Elizabeth Derryberry, associate professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and her colleagues are racing to understand, including the increased prevalence and intensity of heat waves.
Understanding how birds respond to climate change is a critical area of research that Elizabeth Derryberry, associate professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and her colleagues are racing to understand, including the increased prevalence and intensity of heat waves. In a new study published online in Molecular Ecology, the researchers examined how heat impacts the behavior and physiology of Zebra finches.
“Most of what we know about the behavioral and physiological effects of heat comes from aquatic organisms or terrestrial cold-blooded animals, but heat waves could be a real problem for terrestrial birds and mammals too, especially if heat interferes with critical components of their reproductive behavior and physiology,” said Sara Lipshutz, assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago, former graduate student at UT, and first author on the publication. “We wanted to understand how that happens as a first step towards understanding how to manage these problems.”
Heat waves can be lethal for warm-blooded animals, but behavioral and physiological effects are missing from recent high-profile studies on climate change. The researchers wanted to know about sub-lethal effects of heat that do not kill animals, but still might impact their ability to adapt and thrive as the climate changes.
Lipshutz and colleagues exposed zebra finches to a four-hour heat challenge, similar to what wild birds might experience during the afternoon heat on a summer day. Zebra finches were selected for the study because these songbirds experience extreme temperature fluctuations in their native Australia.
Read more at University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Photo Credit: pixel2013 via Pixabay
