Climate change is causing endangered African wild dogs to give birth later, threatening the survival of the pack
Staff, 2022-11-07 12:12:04,
by Neil R Jordan, Briana Abrahms, Daniella Rabaiotti, Kasim Rafiq and Rosie Woodroffe, The Conversation
Wildlife are responding and adapting to climate change in various ways. Some adaptations are more obvious. Flowering plants, for example, are blooming sooner each year in parts of the northern hemisphere as climate change draws the onset of spring progressively earlier in the calendar.
Other adaptations are more covert, as we’ve discovered in the case of the African wild dog.
The African wild dog is an endangered large carnivore with a global population of fewer than 700 packs (fewer than 7,000 individuals) dotted across the African continent in isolated subpopulations. They typically raise their pups in the cooler months each year. However, our new study shows that they are adapting to warming temperatures by giving birth later each year as they track a shrinking cool period.
By following the fates of 60 packs of African wild dogs in Botswana’s Okavango delta—the largest remaining subpopulation of the species—we learned that the average birthing date now occurs more than three weeks later than it did three decades ago. This shift almost perfectly tracked an average daily temperature…
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