A beetle that can sense infrared light. A bird that lays eggs the color of charred ground. A woodpecker that specializes in hunting in burned bark.

Animals have long learned to live alongside wildfires, but those coping skills are being tested as Earth enters the Pyrocene, a new era of unprecedented conflagrations like those this summer in Canada that have stained the skies orange and sent suffocating plumes of smoke over American cities.

Larger and longer-lasting fires are wiping through wildlife populations, morphing habitats and pushing the evolution of animals’ bodies and behaviors to survive in this new, scorched world.

“With megafires and really large, severe fire events, these kinds of adaptations can go into overdrive pretty quickly,” said Gavin Jones, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who wrote an analysis on fire-driven animal evolution published Wednesday in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The big question hanging over biologists is whether wildlife can evolve fast enough to keep up with today’s fiercer fires.

Here are how some animals have already evolved to deal with wildfires – and what may challenge them ahead.

1. BLACK FIRE BEETLE

Stand near a campfire, and you can feel the heat. Bathed in infrared radiation, your body can sense a nearby flame even when your eyes are closed.

The black fire beetle, one of the best-known fire-adapted insects, can do something similar – but from much farther away. Behind a pair of the insect’s legs are infrared-sensitive pits capable of detecting burning wood dozens of miles away.

That extra sensory organ allows the wood-boring bug to not only avoid hazardous flames. Fire acts as an aphrodisiac, signaling the beetles to swarm to heated wood to mate and lay eggs.

2. SPOTTED OWL

This bird of prey likes to live on the edge – the edge, that is, of small scorched forests, feasting on mice and other small mammals that dare to venture across burned landscapes.

But this owl found across the American West has to look out for its own predators, such as the northern goshawk. To avoid those birds, the owl steers clear of larger burn patches – just the sort that are becoming more common in the Pyrocene, causing Jones and others to worry about its long-term future.

“They’re very well suited” for small burn patches, said Jones, who studies the bird. But “these sort of modern megafires [are] not so good for the spotted owl.”

3. ANTECHINUS

The antechinus looks a lot like a mouse: cute whiskers, long tail, round Mickey Mouse-shaped ears. But it’s no rodent.

It’s a tiny marsupial, one that survives Australia’s wildfires by taking shelter underground. To deal with the lack of food after a fire, antechinuses bask in the sun and rest in a state of torpor, absorbing heat from the environment rather than metabolizing fats or sugars.

“The main adaptation seems to be to deal with the post-fire lack of food and ground cover and the increased predation pressure,” said Fritz Geiser, a zoology professor at the University of New England in Australia whose research was included in the review.

Geiser found that antechinuses survived an enormous fire in Warrumbungle National Park in 2013. But Australia’s 2019-2020 megafires were tougher, with other researchers showing that two species of antechinus survived but still suffered after the historic blazes.

4. BLACK-BACKED WOODPECKER

Not all species are doomed to suffer during the Pyrocene. The black-backed woodpecker native to Canada and the western United States flocks to recently burned forests, feeding on outbreaks of beetles in charred trees. Its inky plumage helps it blend in with its smoldering surroundings.

“It almost certainly has expanded into areas that burned recently,” said Dick Hutto, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana who studied the bird.

The woodpecker’s presence, he added, is a reflection of the state of the forest. “If younger-than-10-year-old forests are more common now than they were a few years ago (which they undoubtedly are), then the bird’s range is probably also a bit larger,” he wrote by email.

But given what’s happening to the rest of world in the age of megafires, he added: “That doesn’t mean the recent increase is a good thing overall.”

5. FRILLED LIZARDS

This Australian animal has also evolved to flee from fires. But instead of going underground like the antechinus, this reptile goes up, using tree perches to get away from modest fires early in the dry season and larger trees to take refuge from more intense, late-season fires.

But climate change, coupled with the spread of invasive grasses, is making Australia’s bush fires even worse, increasing the chances that fires burn through even the highest canopies and hardiest trees.

With the lizard and other species, Jones said, “the big question is, can species adapt quickly enough, or do they have the potential genetic material to give them the potential to adapt quickly, to these changing fires?”

“We often think about evolution as this incredibly slow process that happens over many thousands of years,” he added. “But evolution can happen in a single generation.”

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Twitter’s surge in harmful content has become a barrier to advertisers’ return

Next »

Marga Minco, Holocaust writer of understated power, dies at 103