Climate change is causing some Amazonian birds to shapeshift. A new study found rainforest avians have become smaller with longer wings in response to warming temperatures.
Climate change is shape-shifting the bodies of birds in the Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, a concerning new study shows.
Researchers have found several bird species have become smaller with longer wings over several generations in response to hotter and drier conditions, Britain’s The Daily Mail reported.
Smaller bodies are more efficient at dissipating heat, while bigger wings reduce the amount of metabolic heat generated to stay aloft. Affected species include the golden-crowned spadebill, the gray antwren, McConnell's flycatcher and the dusky-throated antshrike.
Adapting to shifting environmental conditions may include 'new physiological or nutritional challenges' for birds, say the scientists, who claim to have eliminated other factors that may have influenced these changes – in other words, there's no doubt climate change is to blame.
"Even in the middle of this pristine Amazon rainforest, we are seeing the global effects of climate change caused by people, including us," said study author Vitek Jirinec, an ecologist at the Integral Ecology Research Center, Blue Lake, California.
Jirinec and colleagues studied data collected on more than 15,000 individual birds that were captured, measured, weighed, marked with a leg band and released, over 40 years of field work in Brazilian Amazonia, at a research location near the city of Manaus.
In total, the scientists investigated 77 species of rainforest birds that live there, from the cool, dark forest floor to the warmer, sunlit midstory.
The midstory is the layer of vegetation in a forest consisting of trees with a height somewhere between the heights of the smallest and tallest trees.
The data revealed nearly all of the birds' bodies have reduced in mass, or become lighter, since the 1980s. All species studied currently have a lower average mass than they did in the early 1980s.
