Climate change is melting away glaciers around the world, but in the Andes Mountains, a wild relative of the llama is helping local ecosystems adapt to these changes by dropping big piles of dung.
Climate change is melting away glaciers around the world, but in the Andes Mountains, a wild relative of the llama is helping local ecosystems adapt to these changes by dropping big piles of dung.
This finding, published Dec 30 in Scientific Reports, revealed that the activity of this animal could accelerate the time plants usually take to establish on new land by over a century, highlighting a surprising way organisms are adapting to climate change.
“It’s interesting to see how a social behavior of these animals can transfer nutrients to a new ecosystem that is very nutrient poor,” said Cliff Bueno de Mesquita, the paper’s co-first author and a research scientist in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder. But the current pace of climate change still outpaces the ability of species to find new habitats, he warned.
Read more at University of Colorado at Boulder
