Word: sheeps
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...over the past 25 years, the average Soay Island wild sheep has decreased in size, according to a report in the July 2 issue of Science by a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London. Thanks largely to global warming, the winters on Soay Island are becoming shorter and milder. That makes food more abundant and allows some of the smaller, more vulnerable and younger sheep to survive. Then they go on to have offspring that tend to be small themselves - and have a better chance of survival because of the increasingly mild winters. "The environmental...
...while being big is still an advantage - size offers a better survival cushion if food proves hard to find - there are other factors that limit how easily that trait is passed down. Coulson and his colleagues identified what they call the "young mum" factor. Sheep, unlike many other mammals, tend to have offspring quite early in life - mothers can have lambs at one-year-old, before they're fully grown. Since the size of the lambs is limited by the size of the mothers, younger mothers have smaller babies. Thanks to the milder winters, more sheep are able to survive...
...species adapt to their surroundings, or they die - and while the environment has also always changed, never has it done so as quickly as it does today, thanks to the billions of tons of CO2 we're shoveling into the atmosphere. (Watch TIME's video "How to Shear a Sheep...
...Soay sheep show, animals can respond to climate change, but not in the ways we're accustomed to. "They can do so in two ways," says Coulson. "They can do so through the evolutionary process, which is a little slower, but they can also adapt by changing their growth rate in response to their environment." Scientists like Coulson can then separate the effects of evolution from the effects of the environment...
...adapt and thrive in a warmer world. Far from it - by some estimates, rapid climate change could drive as many as one-third of the species on the planet out of existence by mid-century. Though warmer winters in blustery Scotland might sound nice - especially if you're a sheep on the small side - the changes due to global warming are likely to be far from positive in most parts of the world. Evolution will help species adapt, but there's a term for what happens when the pace of evolution can't match the pace of climate change: extinction...