研究发现，气候变化超过了进化

研究发现，气候变化超过了进化

Nature doesn't like to be rushed. But to keep up with climate change, many animals will need to evolve 10,000 times faster than they have in the past, a study suggests.

大自然不喜欢匆忙。但一项研究表明，为了跟上气候变化，许多动物需要比过去进化速度快1万倍。

Man-made climate change — fueled by excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, namely carbon dioxide — is expected to raise global temperatures by up to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (6 Celsius) within the next 100 years. That will transform many ecosystems in just a few generations, forcing wildlife to either evolve quickly or risk extinction.

人为造成的气候变化——由大气中过量的温室气体，即二氧化碳造成——预计将在未来100年内使全球气温升高10.8华氏度(6摄氏度)。这将在短短几代人的时间内改变许多生态系统，迫使野生动物要么快速进化，要么面临灭绝的风险。

Published online in the journal Ecology Letters, the study concludes that most land-based vertebrate species evolve too slowly to adjust to the dramatically warmer climate expected by 2100. If they can't make high-speed adaptations or move to a new ecosystem, many terrestrial animal species will cease to exist, the researchers report.

发表在《生态学快报》杂志网络版上的这项研究得出结论说，大多数陆生脊椎动物物种进化太慢，无法适应预计到2100年将显著变暖的气候。研究人员报告说，如果它们不能快速适应环境或迁移到一个新的生态系统，许多陆生动物物种将不复存在。

Image: NOAA/NASA/UCAR

Some animals will likely be able to survive without evolutionary changes, the researchers point out, either by adopting new behaviors or by chasing their favorite climate across the landscape. Those strategies will only work in limited circumstances, though — species will need fallback food sources, for example, and flexible habitat options.

研究人员指出，一些动物很可能在没有进化变化的情况下生存下来，要么通过采取新的行为，要么通过在整个景观中追逐它们喜欢的气候。不过，这些策略只会在有限的情况下奏效——例如，物种将需要后备食物来源，以及灵活的栖息地选择。

To find out more, another research team looked at these adaptive responses more carefully. A group of 60 researchers reviewed 10,090 abstracts and extracted data from 71 studies reported in 58 relevant publications. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, showed a lot of animals adjusting to climate change, but as with the previous study, the question mark remained: Are they changing fast enough?

为了找到更多的答案，另一个研究小组更仔细地观察了这些适应性反应。一组60名研究人员回顾了1090篇摘要，并从58篇相关出版物中报道的71篇研究中提取数据。发表在《自然通讯》杂志上的研究结果显示，很多动物都在适应气候变化，但与之前的研究一样，问题依然存在:它们的变化速度够快吗?

Many of the studies focused on birds, which are relatively easy to study because we have a broad window into their behavioral changes like how early they breed and if they move up their nesting time to coincide with the presence of more bugs. But digging into that data makes it clear that those behavioral changes certainly help, but they are not happening fast enough.

很多研究都集中在鸟类身上，这相对来说比较容易研究，因为我们对鸟类的行为变化有一个广阔的窗口，比如它们繁殖的时间有多早，以及它们是否会提前筑巢时间，以适应更多昆虫的出现。但深入研究这些数据可以清楚地看到，这些行为变化肯定会有所帮助，但它们发生的速度还不够快。

Birds can adapt to climate change by changing the time they lay their eggs. (Photo: Vishnevskiy Vasily/Shutterstock)

As lead author Viktoriia Radchuk of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research told Matt Simon of Wired, "We're experiencing something on the order of 1,000 times faster change in temperature than what was seen in paleo times ... There are limits to these adaptive responses, and the lag is getting too big."

莱布尼茨动物园和野生动物研究所的维克托利亚·拉德查克告诉《连线》杂志的马特·西蒙，“我们正在经历的气温变化速度是旧石器时代的1000倍……这些适应性反应是有限度的，而且滞后越来越大。”