Pests and parasites are already adapting to climate change

Humanity, as a whole, continues to struggle with the ominous, impending idea that the global climate is changing.

Many still deny it. Many others are searching for ways to cope.

How delightful, then, to discover that pests, parasites and pathogens are way out ahead of us – with species already physically evolving to meet the survival challenges of a burgeoning new biosphere.

“Some of the best evidence for climate change involves organisms shifting around the planet, moving north as things warm up in the atmosphere,” Dan Bebber, a senior lecturer in microbial biology at Exeter University in England, told Yahoo Canada.

“They’re able to adapt very quickly to new conditions – whether that’s overcoming the pesticides and things that we use to try to combat them, or adapting to new climates. They can adapt to those quite quickly, and therefore we’re facing greater threats to our agriculture.”

Bebber has recently compiled an intriguing summary of relevant research being conducted around the world. It shows that many species are moving faster and farther than conventional analytic models predict.

“Their distributions are determined in part by weather and climate, so we can try to model how those distributions change,” he explained.

“But then there are these evolutionary tricks and surprises that come along.”

Take the Colorado potato beetle, a thriving little pest originally indigenous to parts of New Mexico. It’s been quietly spreading around the world for ages. Experts confidently felt it would never be able to thrive in northern Asia. The climate in Kazakhstan is simply (supposedly) too cold.

Guess again! When it got too cold on the surface, the bugs took to tunneling to stay warm.

“These beetles evolved this very clever burrowing behaviour to overcome winter,” he said, with a clear note of admiration.

“It completely outwitted the predicted model, and managed to come in from a different route than was expected."

But is this actual evolution? What if these bugs could burrow all along, but just never had to?

“That behaviour is very strongly genetically determined,” Bebber said.

“That gives us good evidence that this beetle has actually evolved to cope with these new conditions.”

He adds:

“In last ten or twenty years, there’s been a kind of acceleration of movements of pests and pathogens around the world. More and more organisms are finding their way to attack new areas, and cause problems for farmers all over the place.

“We live on a very globalized planet. We’re always shipping things all around the world. We’re shipping plants and seeds at increasing rates, and that’s great for economic development and national trade. But we just have to be aware that it’s not just the goods that we want that are being shipped.”

He concluded that while pests evolving is not unusual, the rate at which they’re doing it is something we need to take note of.

“There are always surprises, so we just have to keep a good eye out for these organisms.”