Essay 5. Reptiles In The Face Of A Changing Global Climate

 

“There is something of the marvelous in all things of nature.” – Aristotle

“Men argue. Nature acts. ” – Voltaire

Coral bleaching is ugly. A stark contrast to the vibrancy of living reefs, bursting with life and flashes of fishy colours against vivid coral backdrops, the bony-white, seemingly skeletal remnants of bleaching events are a true, visible impact of global warming. The current sweep of coral die offs this year, including the over 90% bleaching in parts of the World Heritage listed Great Barrier Reef (GBR here on), from Cairns to Papua New Guinea, are strong indicators of things to come (1). Coral bleaching is caused by warming waters forcing the symbiotic microbes or “zooxanthelae” (a colloquial term for the genus Sybiodinium), which live within the coral endoderm and provide nutrients through photosynthesis, to abandon the coral on mass, perhaps seeking a more suitable home (2). With them goes the nutrient production they provide, leaving bleached coral frames and the living coral builders or “polyps” themselves, which will die unless cooler waters and zooxanthelae return. These events are a truly tragic loss. We may lament the loss of biodiversity, the numerous species which depend on the reef for food, shelter, nurseries for young and so forth, many now potentially at risk. We may lament the impact on local coastal communities, many who rely on ecotourism or commercial fishing, both heavily reliant on the reef. We may lament the aesthetic loss of a living marvel, the GBR, the largest living structure in existence, visible from space, drained of its colour and richness. The list continues.

With an undeniably vast scientific consensus, addressing changing global climate change is finally on the table, several decades after the first warnings were published (3). The agreements reached at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, while not as urgent as many deem necessary, placed climate change policy on the global stage (See 4 for the New York Times’ full coverage). The Paris Climate Accord and all of its signatories have made a powerful statement, many nations agreeing to a target of keeping global temperature increases below 1.5°C. Unfortunately here in Australia the message was ignored. Our latest federal budget in May 2016, has no increases for the Emissions Reduction Fund, an essential part of the current LNP government’s questionable Direct Action policy on climate (5). While $171 million has been earmarked for conserving the G GBR, this will all focus on improving water quality, minimizing invasive species, and so forth. Although these local improvements increase resilience, it will all be useless if warming waters aren’t addressed.

Conversely, other conservation areas have been cut, with $483 million simultaneously cut from the LandCare program over the next five years. Massive sweeping losses were announced to the CSIRO, Australia’s crown jewel of research and scientific innovation, in particular to the climate science sectors, causing outrage in the global science community, even a public plea from NASA to reconsider (6). Subsidizing conservation projects in one area by compromising the integrity of others, while failing to address the main cause of the problem and dismantling climate science departments, seems a less than ideal for climate progress. So does building the world’s biggest coal mine, for that matter, yet this is our current government’s plan for Queensland’s Galilee Basin, despite continuing declines in coal prices, repeated warnings about financial viability from Queensland’s own Treasury (7), and the large and growing numbers of vocal dissenters including indigenous owners, the Wangan and Jagalingou, who depend on of these traditional homelands and ecosystems.

In a more recent disgrace to Australia’s environmental reputation (8), the Turnbull government took a rather Orwellian response to a joint publication from Unesco and the Union of Concerned Scientists, entitled “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”. After reviewing the document, the Australia’s Department for Environment apparently took issue with the factual reporting of threats to the environment, particularly the full chapter dedicated to the Great Barrier Reef, as well as sections on the horrendous treatment of Tasmanian old growth forests and the Northern Territory’s unique Kakadu region. All mentions of Australia were removed from the report, an act of screening the likes of which has never been perpetrated by any members of the UN, showing the Turnbull government’s uniquely dishonest climate position. The claim of protecting the precious ecotourism industries of these areas is particularly underhanded, shortsighted, and ultimately illogical; there will be no tourism without addressing threats to environment and climate.

While incompetence in the face of the challenge is troubling, particularly those still clinging to the climate-denial raft (9), many of us can do little more but yell from the couch until the next elections. I am rather couch bound lately by medications (though my lucidity, of course, never in question…), and shall be ranting from a prone position for a while! Rather than wallow in political ineptitude and restorative boredom, I propose we take this opportunity to discuss climate and, naturally, reptiles. Namely, how will reptile communities, and other organisms, respond to climate fluctuations, and what does this mean for their future? This is no trivial subject. How organisms respond (or not) to climate change is an essential driver of change in Earth’s biogeography (10), particularly important if we fail to curtail emissions and transition to renewable energy. How do we study the response of various organisms to a changing global climate? Can we predict how our biosphere, including our reptile fauna, will react?

One of the first challenges is to determine what makes a species sensitive to climate variation. Luckily, we ourselves need not leave the couch on this one, as the research is extensive. Literature on the subject suggests factors can include, but are not necessarily limited to, whether the species is generalist or specialist, aspects of physiology, life-history, habitat sensitivity, dispersal ability and surrounding landscapes, dependence on disturbance, climate-dependent relationships, interacting non-climatic stressors, and more (11,12). This information could be used to assess to which degree various species are susceptible to perturbations in temperature or other impacts such as changed rainfall conditions (13). While making any sense of this might seem to require a savant-like understanding of the ecology of every organism, a talent for database mining may perhaps serve better. Utilizing software or novel programs to search through published scientific works, tabulating desired statistics for target groups, is the preferred method.

Such studies tell us much about what species and groups are sensitive, however the actual vulnerability to climate change involves a more complicated relationship between sensitivity, adaptive capacity to change, and level of exposure to climate impacts. By mapping the distributions of organisms against predicted global climate impacts, sensitivity and adaptability can be compared to local threats, giving a better account of vulnerability globally (14). While there are many underlying assumptions in these studies, from the accuracy of the ecological traits assessing sensitivity to uncertainties in the climate simulation methods, these problems are somewhat unavoidable, but not unmanageable. Climate change research does have a tendency to rely on models; how else can one make predictions of such complicated, temporally dynamic systems? In fact, it appears that over the last ten years, about 55% of all scientific research papers involving computer modelling were in some way climate related (15). Our uncertainties are somewhat mitigated in various ways, like increasing samples size, looking for correlations in responses across groups, using multiple analytical methods and comparing the results, and statistical significance tests (see 16, Flannery, 2005, chapter 16. Model Worlds, for an engaging discussion on climate and models.) While this reliance on simulation and modelling seems like weak footing, there are few other options than to interpret results with caution, and as the models themselves improve with time and the diligent efforts of scientists, so do the monitoring and survey methods to validate them (16, 17, 18)

Reptiles are more reliant on environmental temperatures than mammals and birds, despite their generally wider thermal tolerance. This is particularly so at the margins of their ranges where they are likely to already be near some adaptive threshold (too hot, too cold, or perhaps just too much competition at from neighbours). Reptiles and amphibians are also less capable of long distance dispersal than other fauna, less able to migrate to more suitable habitats (13). For example, when various future climate models are applied to the reptile communities of southwest Europe’s Iberian Peninsula, a biodiversity hotspot, results suggests that while certain species may manage, adapting or expanding to historically cooler localities or newly accessible ranges, extinction is likely for at least 13 of the 37 species included. In an assessment of threatened terrestrial species, Australia’s reptiles also appear to face an unstable future (13). Despite the most climate vulnerable species in Australia being the mountain pygmy possum, Burramys parvus, birds and mammals are less at risk than plants, amphibians, and reptiles. Reptiles require daytime refuges or habitats with a temperature gradient for homeostasis, as well as environmental features such as burrows, rock/timber shelters, and certain vegetation and prey types. Such specificities narrow an organism’s adaptive options.

Already there appears to be broad changes in phenology, the timing of seasonal behaviours, such as breeding, flowering, or hibernation, around the globe. Many species in the temperate zones show an average shift in spring events to 5.1 days earlier per decade (19). This was published in 2003, hardly new information, and our climate has warmed further since then, to 1.22°C above the long-term 20th century average. One Australian reptile showing such phenological change is Tiliqua rugosa, a truly enigmatic creature a.k.a. the shingleback, sleepy lizard, bobtail, and other charming monikers. Breeding pairs are monogamous, meeting at the same location at the start of breeding season, a season which over 15 years of field observation has been commencing earlier and earlier (20). Similar early onset breeding is common in other organisms, and while potentially a reproductive boon, perhaps allowing for additional litters in a season for example, breeding cycles can become unsynchronized from necessary seasonal resource availability, leading to more failed breeding attempts (21, 22). Though some reptiles may be able to track their optimal environment, or in fact receive a fitness improvement from earlier seasons, more have suffered declines in population size and fitness, even local or global extinction events (23).

Aside from phenology, studies showing range contractions and population declines are also emerging. Significantly affected are those unable to migrate, perhaps due to lower intrinsic dispersal ability (do they crawl, run, or fly?), or due to geographical  dispersal barriers such as mountain ranges, or man-made barriers like roads and walls (11; 24). Isolated alpines species are particularly vulnerable, like the aforementioned mountain pygmy possum (B. parvus, 11), however reptiles can be similarly restricted. The New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake (Crotalus willardi obscurus), is such a species, trapped by its preference for colder, higher altitudes exclusively in the Madrean Sky Islands, cool, isolated pine-oak forests atop mountain ranges bordering the US and Mexico. So cool-adapted are C. w. obscurus that they’re are unable to cope below certain elevations, the intervening arid lowlands too hostile to traverse to more suitable habitat (25). As climate warms it can only go higher. Sky islands across the globe are home to many rare organisms, all similarly imperiled, suitable habitat contracting with temperature and elevation until it disappears.

A less immediately obvious concern involves sex determination in crocodilians, tuataras, many turtles, and some lizard species. Most animals use a variant Genotypic Sex Determiniation (GSD), with genes on sex-chromosomes determining gender during development. These chromosomes come in a variety of flavours, from the Z/W system of most birds and reptiles (confusing things further, the heterogametic ZW genotype are females, males are the homegametic ZZ), to the bizarre X1Y1X2Y2X3Y3X4Y4X5Y5 system of the platypus and other monotremes. Let’s not get into fungi, with their potentially thousands of “sexes”. Any such sex chromosomes are apparently rare or absent in crocodilians, turtles, and some lizards, employing Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination (TSD). This involves a thermosensitive period during development where the embryo’s sex is irreversibly determined by temperature (26, 27). With changes in seasonal temperature, sex ratios in nests are going to be skewed, and the possible implications of generation after generation of changed sex ratios are concerning to say the least.

Additionally, certain lizards such as Australian bearded dragons, the Pogona genus, who typically employ GSD, exhibit TSD under extreme conditions (27). In a phenomenon known as sex-reversal, developing dragon embryos will all become female at high temperatures, in spite of their sex chromosomes. This isn’t merely a bizarre laboratory manipulation, 11 of 131 wild caught bearded dragons had male ZZ chromosomes yet were phenotypic females, capable of having ovigenesis. Sex reversals were previously only known from fish and amphibians, but who knows how many reptile species are susceptible to such impacts at extremes? While I personally suspect human society would function much better if all-female, I suppose males do play an important role, particularly for genetic diversity in wildlife populations.

Questions about the future are inherently problematic. As discussed, trends and models predicting future outcomes have their issues. But scientists are also historians, our ideas and models of how the cosmos works are built on past events, even if to predict future events. We know the Earth’s climate has not been in its existing, rather favourable state for the last 4.5 billion years. Extremely inhospitable temperatures, unpredictable geology, lifeless terrain and unbreathable gasses would’ve been the main experience on terra firma 3.2 billion years ago. Eventually, chemosynthetic ocean microbes evolved a way to utilize energy from sunlight and chemicals in their environment to trap potential energy. After evolutionary tinkering for around one billion years, the atmosphere was slowly pumped full of the corrosive waste products from a newer energy production cycle, some 2.3 billion years ago (28). Bipedal apes later named one of these waste products ‘oxygen’, the process ‘photosynthesis’. Throughout these billions of years, the climate has not been stable, changing with cycles in solar activity, in orbital distances, the odd megavolcano, potentially life extinguishing asteroids and so forth, and a strongly fluctuating greenhouse effect. Ice ages are more common than we’d like to think. Our present flash of human existence society was only possible in the current, warm interglacial period which we refer to as the Holocene. This commenced around 11,700 years ago, coinciding with the beginning of modern civilization and culture, humanity’s Neolithic revolution, gently hinting at some significance of climate for humans and life on Earth (10, 16, 17, 28).

Earth itself can tell us a lot about how life responds to changes, particularly if we can determine how current biogeography and evolutionary evidence, like fossils and genetic architecture, fit into the narrative of past conditions. The start of interglacial periods as ice ages lose hold and temperatures rise are of interest to scientists, as they give us some precedent to compare our own plight to, if we can read the evidence. While tree ring and ice core samples, oil and mineral deposit compositions, and more, can give us a timeline about the atmosphere of the past (10, 16, 17), how organisms responded is somewhat more difficult to unravel, though not impossible, as we shall see.

We generally think of fossils as large bony objects, depicting dinosaurs, or perhaps for some, the smaller invertebrates like trilobites and nautili which adorn displays and bookshelves worldwide. These are all “macrofossils”. The “microfossils” of the world are too small for the naked eye, requiring magnification to study. But as any hay fever sufferer can tell you, pollen is freaking everywhere. This makes microfossils excellent for paleoclimatology. Fossil pollen and spore samples, for example, can be found in ice cores or in stratified lake sediments, telling us much about plant and fungi distributions of the past (10, 16, 29). Locations of fossils, both geographically and their placement in whatever sediment they were found, are of essential importance to their age. The distribution of fossils show how various species migrate, populations change, ranges expand and contract, particularly in the northern hemisphere prior to the Pleistocene warming as the ice caps waxed and waned, grew and then melted back, repeatedly reducing then re-growing whole ecosystems. Great climatic variation caused continent wide shifts in plant and animal distributions, corresponding with our accounts of the physical climate from tree rings, ice cores, their constituent Carbon and other isotope ratios, and more (30).

Thus the buried remains of the dead tell a story which matches that from our tumultuous climactic past. The living tell a similar story, with the biogeography of living animals strongly influenced by past climates. Moreover, we the living carry within us, to borrow a term, our ancestors tales, in patterns of genetic variance and diversity. Our modern molecular methods allow dating of how long until genes coalesce and converge backwards in time, allowing us to estimate the age of different species, genes, and gene families (31, 32). As demographic changes in populations are reflected in our genetics, we can infer changes to our population throughout time by examining the diversity of these variously aged genes, such as expansions and contractions in population sizes and/or range margins due to glaciation and climate (31, 32, 33). Australian geckoes, for example, show much higher diversity and older coalescent history in their montane refugia than in the lowland deserts, a genetic artefact of recent colonization of the arid lowlands, as prior Pleistocene climates kept geckoes confided to the mountains (31).

Climate change is etched in our DNA, its history shaping life on earth to a greater extent than we seem to appreciate. We need only look at the great and beautiful, multi-tonal spread of skin colours in humanity from the equators to the poles. A direct adaptation to greater and lesser amounts of UV light, a scorching, fearsome enemy to be protected against at low latitudes, and yet necessary for Vitamin D production and essential to existence at high latitudes, thus the variation in protective melanin genes and skin tones. Our population genetics also show a time when, due to wild swings in the global climate and truly harsh conditions, our human population dropped to a mere 2000 or so individuals (16). We were “endangered”, the risk of extinction was real. Various species show similar losses of diversity, genetic bottlenecks, where valuable genetic variation, including entire species, were lost in climate related population crashes (34, 35). It was only in the Holocene that our numbers began to expand in earnest.

From the study of variation and distribution living biota, their scattered, ancient remnants, and the evidence of climactic conditions, from a variety of different sources, we come to see that life in fact can, and will, adapt to changing climates. Current models predict certain factors will mitigate impacts, or allow for adaptation and range shifts to occur with minimal impacts in some species, even positive responses in some. Tropical lizards for example, a group which were considered highly at risk, have recently been predicted to adapt rather successfully to current projected changes (36). Of course, many others will be less fortunate. This is reflected in the fossil record, an account of failure and death throughout life’s history, from the KT mass extinction and various other disasters, to the ever present tooth-and-claw of survival and competition. In past times, added climate variation would’ve been seemingly unending struggle, a constant challenge for many species, including ourselves (10, 28, 29). This was at a rate of perhaps 1°C per thousand years (16). If the commonly proposed target of less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels seems somewhat arbitrary, that’s because it was chosen rather arbitrarily and more for political expediency than scientific rigor (37). The COP21 target of 1.5°C is more defensible, decreasing the risks to wildlife and ecosystems, as well as humanity. Nonetheless, models show many reptile species appear to cope successfully with some climate change, through rarely without severe impacts, and other taxa will fare much worse.

And so, we lay our hopes in models which try to predict the future, while we fight to keep the world’s carbon emissions decreasing. We fight to stop global habitat destruction, the current cause of our accelerating species loss, and we fight for growing forests to sequester as much CO2 as possible. We fight against large polluters who pay to play dirty. We fight against leaders who would sell off our very future, against anti-scientific rhetoric favoring money over facts. The stage has been set, and no greater challenge have we ever faced, as part of the ecosystem, as an intelligent, conscious being, intricately tied to the comings and goings of this, the only world that we know of with coral reefs.

 

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