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science news of the year | Life
16 years | possible time to extinction in Northeast of little brown myotis bat
Warming changes how
and where animals live
New concerns have emerged about how climate warming might challenge animals and change the way they
go about their lives. For example, a coalition of lizard
specialists suggests that by midcentury a third of lizard
populations won’t have enough time for foraging or
other vital pursuits simply because they’ll have to spend
long stretches cooling off in shady refuges (SN Online:
5/13/10). Overall, organisms such as lizards that
depend on their environment to regulate body temperature—those often referred to as cold-blooded—may
get a disproportionate jolt in the tropics. A temperature
uptick has more metabolic impact on lizards living in
already hot climates, researchers report, with effects
that could ripple through tropical ecosystems (SN
Online: 10/6/10).
Climate change also appears to be revamping relationships among species, according to an analysis of
Europe’s common cuckoo and the birds it dupes into
raising its young. As warmer springs have pushed
short-distance migrators toward earlier nesting times,
cuckoos have fallen out of sync and are instead laying
more eggs in the nests of fellow long-distance migrants
such as reed warblers (SN: 10/9/10, p. 11). Meanwhile,
migration itself has become problematic for a population of Yellowstone elk that can no longer find good
summer grazing in high meadows (SN: 7/17/10, p. 12).
Warming may threaten tropical lizards like this caiman.
What counts More than
2,700 scientists worldwide
conclude the decade-long
Census of Marine Life by
reporting that the majority
of sea organisms (
Hydro-medusae jellyfish shown
below) are still unknown to
science (SN: 10/23/10, p. 14).
And that doesn’t even count
microbes.
O no Three species of tiny
sediment-dwelling loricifer-ans from a briny basin deep
in the Mediterranean may
live their entire lives without oxygen, which would
make them the first multicellular animals known to
do so (SN: 5/8/10, p. 5).
O yes Microbiologists have
found a fourth biological
pathway for producing oxygen: a method, employed by
certain bacteria, that breaks
down nitrite compounds
(SN Online: 3/24/10).
and has bright yellow spots
(SN: 5/8/10, p. 8). Primatologists finally describe a new
species of titi monkey (right)
that had remained undocumented because of violence
in its region of Colombia (SN
Online: 8/12/10). A newly
discovered cricket turns
out to be the first recorded
pollinator in its taxonomic
order (SN Online: 1/18/10).
Males of a newly described
species of dance fly have
lopsided front legs, growing
one typical appendage and
another adorned with what
looks like a little tufted balloon (SN Online: 9/21/10).
A mongooselike creature
from Madagascar is the first
new carnivore species to be
discovered in more than 20
years (SN Online: 10/12/10).
And two new fish species,
both pancake batfishes, are
discovered in a habitat that
has been threatened by the
Gulf oil spill (SN: 8/14/10,
p. 10).
New species DNA analysis
suggests killer whales might
be not one but at least four
species (SN: 5/22/10, p. 8).
A shy monitor lizard in the
Philippines was described
only this year, even though
it reaches 2 meters in length
Missed it A deadline passes
for 193 member nations of
the Convention on Biological
Diversity to make significant
progress on slowing species
loss, but the targets aren’t
met (SN: 3/13/10, p. 20).
