WIKIMEDIA, CHARLESJSHARPAs climate change warms the earth, scientists are beginning to catalog the potential consequences for organisms, from tropical coral reefs to Antarctic penguins. Researchers report today (May 8) in Nature Ecology and Evolution, that bacteria, too, feel the heat. From experiments in a field station in southern France, Elvire Bestion and her colleagues found that warmer temperatures were associated with decreased gut-microbial diversity in the common lizard.
Bestion, a research fellow at the University of Exeter in the U.K., chose increases of 2 °C and 3 °C (3.6 °F and 5.4 °F) because these are the amounts by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted temperatures will rise in southern Europe by 2080, she and her coauthors wrote in their study.
Attempting to understand how climate affects the lizard gut microbiome “theoretically is important because we actually don’t have a very good handle on how changing temperature regimes or other aspects of climate are going to influence microbiomes,” Susan Perkins, who studies both lizards and microbes at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and was not involved in the work, told The Scientist. That said, “I ...
.jpg){kind=link}