For example, the ticks that spread Lyme disease are dramatically expanding their range in the northern United States. Bats also move around, and diseases like rabies spread with them.
In the Northeast, lobsters are dying from a fungal disease linked to warming, and fish are migrating north or into deeper waters in search of cooler temperatures. This leaves seabirds like puffins with a dwindling food supply and forces commercial fisheries to switch to new types of catch.
“Too often we reduce the effects of climate change to warming of the world in general, and we often don’t think about the vast interconnected world we live in,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. he said. ,
While species have been redistributed across the planet for millions of years in response to climate, the changes are now “happening fundamentally rapidly,” Dr. Tingley said. “It’s not going to work out well for a lot of species, and it’s not going to be great in terms of ecosystem sustainability.”
In Hawaii, the invasion of new mosquito species threatens two endangered species of birds with avian malaria: ‘Akeke’ and ‘Akikiki’. There are less than 1,000 ‘Akeke’ and less than 50 ‘Akikiki’; The latter has declined sharply in recent years and is expected to go extinct this decade, Dr. Tingley said.
He and other researchers underscored the importance of collecting data to understand how and how fast mosquitoes and other disease carriers are moving around the world. The warmer climate is expected to be beneficial to mosquitoes because they and the parasites they carry reproduce faster at higher temperatures.
“We live in a world that is 1.2 degrees warmer, and we haven’t really investigated whether that is starting to happen,” Dr. Carlson said.