Climate may play a role in how fast new species evolve

New species may develop faster as their predecessors evolve to adapt to changing climates, a new study led by a University of Minnesota scientist shows. The study, published in the November issue of the journal "Ecology Letters," is the first to show that the rate at which species accumulate over time is strongly related to the rate at which species adapt to different climates.

"Both rates are particularly rapid among species inhabiting tropical regions, and so our results offer a novel and surprising explanation for why so many of Earth’s species are found in the tropics," said the study’s lead author, Ken Kozak, who is a curator in the Bell Museum of Natural History and an assistant professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at the U of M. They also examined how overlap between species in space influenced their rate of adaptation to different climate; they found slower rates where more species overlap in their geographic ranges.

"Our findings reveal what factors influence the rate at which species adapted to climate change in the past, and suggest that interactions between species might be important in preventing the adaptation of species to human-induced climate change in the future," Kozak said.

 

For the study, Kozak and his co-author, John Wiens, an associate professor at Stony Brook University, examined climatic and evolutionary data from 250 species of salamanders. These 250 species are found in diverse habitats ranging from the mountaintops of North America, to the cloud forests and lowland jungles of Central and South America.