ABOVE: The Luquillo rainforest of Puerto Rico
WIKIMEDIA: US FOREST SERVICE - SOUTHERN REGION
Since the 1970s, populations of arthropods—a group of animals that includes exoskeleton-bearing critters such as insects, spiders, centipedes, and millipedes—in the Puerto Rican rainforest have drastically fallen, according to a study published Monday (October 15) in PNAS.
Rensselaer Polytechnic University biologist Bradford Lister first collected data about arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest in 1976. He and coauthor Andres Garcia, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), repeated the measurement in 2012 and found that it was 10 to 60 times smaller than it was 36 years earlier, according to a press release. That’s a decline of 99 percent, according to Science.
Also during that period, the temperature in the forest rose by 2 °C (3.6 °F). Lister tells The Washington Post that according to their analysis, the warming was the most likely ...
