Why do climate deniers hate baby mooses?
Bullwinkle’s brethren are on the decline.
Two environmental groups filed a petition Thursday to put the Midwestern moose — which roams Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, and Wisconsin — on the endangered species list, citing climate change as a leading cause of population decline.
In the most dramatic instance, the moose population in Minnesota has dropped nearly 60 percent in the past decade, the Center for Biological Diversity and Honor the Earth’s petition states.
“Rising temperatures and decreasing snowfall put moose at increased risk of overheating, which leads to malnutrition and lowers their immune systems, while ticks and other pathogens thrive in a warming climate,” the groups said in a statement. The group did not find that the species has been subject to over-hunting. In fact, Minnesota canceled its moose hunt two years ago, and other states have already either banned it or limited hunting licenses.
If the petition is successful, the moose will be eligible for the protections offered by the Endangered Species Act, including habitat conservation and population recovery plans.
Moose are cold-weather creatures, and warmer winters along the northern United States are not only bad for them — they are good for moose parasites. Brainworm and winter ticks were responsible for nearly half the moose deaths recorded by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in the winter of 2013-2014.
Ticks have largely been blamed for the devastation of moose in the Northeast, as well. Warmer winters mean ticks aren’t killed off. In New Hampshire, moose bearing as many as 150,000 ticks were found to waste away and die, according to the Washington Post.
“It’s a pretty tough way to go,” Kristine Rines, a wildlife biologist and moose project leader for the state’s Fish and Game Department, told the paper. “There’s no question that climate plays a huge part in this. If we had winters that lasted as long as they used to, we might not be having this conversation.”
Climate Change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests.
As global temperatures have risen, bumblebees have disappeared from the warmest regions they occupy, but have not spread northward to take advantage of new habitat, the study finds.“They just aren’t colonizing new areas to track rapid, human-caused climate change,” study co-author Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa, said at a conference.
Bumblebees are crucial to maintaining biodiversity in the regions they inhabit. Pollination by insects is critical to producing around a third of the food humans consume. Unlike other species, which adapt to warming temperatures by moving north into cooler “ranges,” bees have tended to stay put. As a result, huge swaths of bumblebee populations are dying off. And quickly.
“One of the scariest parts of the work that I’ve done is just realizing how quickly the situation is changing,” Colla said in a press release. “The bumblebees that are in decline were doing fine 50 years ago. We’re talking about large changes in community composition of essential pollinators over just a few decades.”
The study also indicates what many climate change deniers have likely ignored: that the deaths are the direct result of global warming, and not pesticide usage or habitat demolition.
Another co-author of the study, Jeremy Kerr, a professor at the University of Ottawa, put it more bluntly: “These species are at serious and immediate risk, for rapid human-induced climate change.” In fact, two species of bumblebee (Cullem’s bumblebee and the short-haired bumblebee) have already gone completely extinct in the U.K. in the last century, and many more are threatened. “The impacts [of bee die-offs] are large and they are under way,” Kerr told the BBC. “They are not just something to worry about at some vague future time.”
The study’s authors say that humans may be bumblebees’ last hope for survival, and that assisting the migration of bees to cooler climates could be beneficial. Though this is not a guaranteed solution, as the bees’ preferences and adaptability vary widely by species, Kerr expressed tempered optimism: “If we are serious about preserving species like bumblebees for the future, it is possible we will need to intervene in a significant and extensive way to help them adapt.”