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November 6 (UPI) – According to new research, the features that contribute to creating biodiversity in tropical mountain species also make them more vulnerable to climate change.
Researchers at Cornell and three other universities compiled the study data, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a two-year period, the team collected samples from the Colorado Rocky Mountain streams and the Ecuadorian Andes.
They found that animals living in the tropical mountains can not adapt to drastic climate change. This keeps these animals isolated in an ecosystem and unlikely to move to others.
Over time, this geographic stagnation can slow gene flow and move animals away from neighboring populations, researchers said. This isolation can also cause genetic changes in different populations that lead to new species.
But living in these narrow niche mountain environments makes these animals vulnerable to large climatic fluctuations.
The research compared the rates of evolution of new species in three insects of aquatic streams in temperate and tropical highlands: ephemeral mayflies, stone flies or stoneflies, and caddisflies, or caddis.
They traced the range of motion of each species by measuring their temperature tolerance and examining the genetics of their population.
"Because the tropics are not as seasonal as the more northern temperate zones, tropical insects can not be too cold or too hot and therefore have a narrow thermal width," said Kelly Zamudio, a professor in the Goldwin-Smith department of ecology and biology of evolution and a senior co-author of the study, told the Cornell Chronicle.
"We also found that they were moving less on the side of the mountain and that there were more species [on tropical mountains] Therefore. Nobody had tested these three models in the same system before, "Zamudio said.
On the other hand, she added, animals living in temperate areas have to endure four seasons of different weather conditions, making them more adaptable to different regions. It also allows them to share genes among populations, which makes them less diverse.
These results corroborate similar research conducted in 1967, the researchers said.
Future tests could be done to determine if the same trends existed in other mountain species, in order to predict which population would be most at risk.
"It is truly paradoxical that the same factors that lead to many species are those that will endanger these species in the tropics," said Zamudio.
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