This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Climate change presents animals and plants with a fundamental challenge: What can they do when their established habitats become increasingly warm? They can adapt to the changing conditions—or move to areas where the climate remains suitable for them.
Among butterflies in the German Alps, the second response appears to play a particularly important role. This is the finding of a new study by Dr. Esme Ashe-Jepson from the Chair of Global Change Ecology at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU).
The results have now been published in the journal Communications Biology. Butterflies are ectotherms, meaning that their body temperature depends heavily on environmental conditions. This makes them particularly sensitive to changes in climate.
Ashe-Jepson wanted to find out how adaptable different species are and how much heat they can tolerate. To do so, she studied butterflies along an elevational gradient in the German Alps. She examined physical characteristics such as size and coloration and compared her observations with changes in the butterflies' elevational ranges over the past decade.
"Species are not static objects. In principle, they can respond to their environment through adaptation or evolutionary change," says Ashe-Jepson. "However, in the butterflies I studied, I found little evidence that their capacity to thermoregulate or their heat tolerance had adapted to different climatic conditions." Instead, a different response emerged: Species that are less able to regulate their body temperature have shifted their ranges particularly strongly toward higher—and therefore cooler—elevations.
The findings suggest that butterflies are responding to climate change primarily by shifting their distributions rather than adapting in place to rising temperatures. This reflects the distinction Ashe-Jepson makes in both the questionnaire and the paper between species redistribution and adaptation in place. Size and coloration also affect how butterflies cope with heat.
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