Can the snowshoe hare’s colour change keep up with climate change?

Twice a year, the snowshoe hare changes out the colour of its fur to keep up with the seasons, but this fashion sense has been causing it some trouble in recent years, due to the effects of climate change.

The snowshoe hare is a great example of how nature adapts to natural climate change. Throughout the year it changes the colour of its fur — white to brown in the spring and then back to white in the fall — to help it avoid being seen by the abundant predators that want to make a tasty meal of it.

Their camouflage has helped them blend in with their surroundings so well that even the researchers tracking them with radio transmitters have had a hard time seeing them (even when they're only a short distance away).

"There's times when you're tracking them and you know they're really, really close, and you just can't find them," University of Montana grad student Alex Kumar told NPR over the weekend.

In recent years that's changed, though. With the effects of climate change making the timing of the spring melt and fall snow accumulation far more uncertain, the scientists have been seeing a lot more white hares showing up very easily against the dark greens and browns of the forest floor.

"If the hares are consistently molting at the same time, year after year, and the snowfall comes later and melts earlier, there's going to be more and more times when hares are mismatched," said Kumar.

Scott Mills, who leads the research, believes that the hares do have the ability to adapt, since the species has been doing so for some time. The fact that so many 'mismatched' hares getting eaten, may even put pressure on the species to speed up their evolution, so they change colour earlier in the spring and later in the winter (or don't change at all).

However, the rate of climate change may outstrip the hare's ability. As Mills told NPR, "really what we don't know very well is how fast is too fast?"

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And that's the biggest concerns about climate change these days. We're pushing the rate of change faster than it has ever happened in the past. The last time the planet experienced a rise in temperature similar to what we've been seeing recently, it started around 11,300 years ago and nature took over 2,000 years to do it on its own. We've caused that same amount of warming in just the last 75 years.

Nature always adapts to climate change, but species survival depends on how much time they have to make the necessary adaptations. At the rate we're driving climate change, it may be too fast for many species (including us) to be able to adapt. The planet would surely recover at some point, but what's far less sure is whether or not the human species would be around to see it.

(Photo courtesy: L. Scott Mills et al./PNAS)

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