(I looked it up he’s right.) Nearby, graduate students counted bumblebees by netting and loading them into plastic vials. Inouye warned me with a sly smile to avoid the corn lilies, which contain toxic alkaloids that can make ewes birth lambs with a single centered eye, like a Cyclops. He popped a strand into his mouth, and I did the same, tasting earthy sweetness, like spinach. “Try this,” he said, handing me the green leaf from a glacier lily. Around us, hummingbirds wing-whistled among the lupines, aspen sunflowers, and dwarf larkspurs. It’s no ordinary field station: Science labs and housing are tucked into aging buildings-all that remains of board-and-batten Gothic, an abandoned 19th-century mining town eight miles north of Crested Butte. Inouye and I strolled through cool green fields of wild parsnip and false skunk cabbage as we toured the nearly century-old Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, one of the most important phenology research sites in the world. But to understand why that change is happening-and what it means-scientists must cast a wider net. “Study any species in isolation, and you may know if they’re changing,” he told me one June morning as we stood in a meadow in thin air near 10,000 feet.
So what happens then, when we revamp nature’s schedule in every wild system on Earth at once, altering timing for some things but not others? Few understand the implications better than Inouye. That’s because snow is arriving later and melting earlier, but their color transition is triggered by seasonal shifts in daylight, which, of course, isn’t changing at all. Many are increasingly seen with halogen-bright white bodies crouched in green forests or brown brush or on yellow tundra. Now they’re often out of sync with their surroundings. Snowshoe hares, Siberian hamsters, collared lemmings, and long-tailed weasels all turn white in winter as a form of protective camouflage in snow. Even beings that don’t appear to be changing are seeing their world change around them. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once. Too many patterns are shifting at the same time, each influenced by countless others, which are themselves also in motion. “Species are not responding identically,” said David Inouye, a University of Maryland professor emeritus and leading phenology researcher. As with daylight saving time, we’d muddle through together. If everything shifted in the same direction and by roughly the same amount, our new calendar might prove insignificant. What’s harder to grasp is the severity of the consequences-for plants, animals, and us. South Carolina’s dwarf salamanders are arriving at breeding grounds 76 days later. In North Dakota’s Red River Valley, scientists found 65 of 83 bird species arriving earlier, some by as much as 31 days. Humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine are gathering 19 days later than they once did, while jack mackerel, hake, and rockfish are spawning earlier in the North Pacific. The timing of leaf appearance and leaf dropping has already shifted dramatically across more than half the planet. “It’s much nicer when they poop in the trap and not on us,” he said.Ĭhanges are discovered almost everywhere scientists look. Then Philson thanked his subject for not dousing us in feces. After she ran a square of foam through the marmot’s mouth for cell samples, Philson’s colleague, UCLA master’s student Mackenzie Scurka, used calipers to measure one tiny paw. candidate at UCLA, told me as he held Anchor in a dark Kevlar bag so the animal couldn’t slice a finger with his huge incisors. “It’s get fat or die,” Conner Philson, a Ph.D. They mate, give birth, and spend summers chowing down before they hibernate again. But lately researchers have also turned their attention to tracking how a warming planet is shifting nature’s schedule and, perhaps, affecting marmot health.Įach spring marmots rise from their winter slumber. Since 1962, scientists in this high mountain meadow have been mapping marmots’ social lives. Now a couple of scientists sampled his DNA to measure how fast this fur ball was growing. It was a cool, crisp evening in west-central Colorado, and the 11-month-old male yellow-bellied marmot had wandered into a metal cage trap. Anchor the marmot was surprisingly calm, considering a stranger had just swabbed his cheek.
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