Over the past 60 years, climate change has forced certain ant species, unable to tolerate higher temperatures, out of their original habitats in Gregory Canyon near Boulder, Colorado, according to a new research published April 9 in the journal Ecology. The resulting biodiversity change could potentially alter local ecosystems, according to first author Anna Paraskevopoulos, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Like all insects, ants are ectothermic, meaning their body temperature, metabolism and other bodily functions depend on the environment's temperature. As a result, ants are sensitive to temperature fluctuations, making them a good marker to study the impact climate change has on ecosystems. More than six decades ago, CU Boulder entomologist Robert Gregg and his student John Browne surveyed the ant populations in Gregory Canyon. After reading their study, Paraskevopoulos and her team set off to investigate whether the ant community had changed since. The researchers sampled the same survey sites on roughly the same dates between 2021 and 2022 as Browne and Gregg did in 1957 and 1958. The team collected hundreds of ant samples from different parts of Gregory Canyon, each with its own unique environment. For example, the canyon's north-facing slope is a forest with cool temperatures, dominated by pine and fir trees. The south-facing slope is primarily shrubland, while streams and ditches shape the canyon bottom area. While the city of Boulder has expanded greatly since the original study, Gregory Canyon has remained a natural environment and largely unaffected by land-use change. "This gave us an opportunity to study the isolated impacts of climate change. In many other studies, the effect of land use and climate change are often entangled," Paraskevopoulos said. While she and her team discovered some ant species that were not recorded previously in... |