Maxim Kleyer
Professor Vejdemo-Johansson
HON 223 Seminar
November 8, 2021
The science article I chose this week was about the findings of tropical birds shrinking in size due to climate change. In the article Climate change may be shrinking tropical birds by Jonathan Lambert, talks about how the change in size of some animals help them stay cooler as temperatures rise. Over the last 40 years, in a remote corner of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, researchers have spent decades catching and measuring birds in a large swath of forest unmarred by roads or deforestation. To the surprise of the researchers, in this pocket of the wilderness, the birds are shrinking. To see if birds that stay put have also been shrinking, Jirinec and colleagues analyzed data on nonmigratory birds collected from 1979 to 2019 in an intact region of the Amazon that spans 43 kilometers. The dataset includes measurements such as mass and wing length for over 11,000 individual birds of 77 species. The researchers also examined climate data for the region. In conclusion, each birds’ mass decreased the most in the year or two after especially hot and dry spells, which tracks with the idea that birds are getting smaller to deal with heat stress. In comparison to the actual research article, the news article and the research article go together very well. Just like any news article, the most important facts are stated. The research article presented by Jirinec and his colleagues provide more evidence for the shrinking of the birds over the years. The research article lists every step taken to identify each birds mass and height without disturbing the wildlife around them. In the results sub-section of the article, Jirinec explains what they used to find the climate trend of the area and how it affected the birds and wildlife. And finally, the results of the shrinkage of the birds were to keep them cool. Just like every animal that sweat, having a larger body mass means more struggle when living in a dry and hot area.
Citations:
- https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-shrinking-birds-tropical
- V. Jirinec et al. Morphological consequences of climate change for resident birds in intact Amazonian rainforest. Science Advances. Published online November 12, 2021. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abk1743.
- B.C. Weeks et al. Shared morphological consequences of global warming in North American migratory birds. Ecology Letters. Vol. 23, February 2020, p. 316. doi: 10.1111/ele.13434.
