Research shows that ant communities become destabilized and less resilient due to climate change.
Climate change models destabilizing forest ant communities may be a harbinger of bigger issues in the ecosystem.
A five-year, multi-university study on the impact of climate change on ant communities in Harvard Forest, Massachusetts and Duke Forest in the Piedmont Region of North Carolina shows that the loss of stability due to climate change makes communities less resilient and slower to rebound when disturbed.
“We’ve had a unique opportunity to look under the hood of how these ant communities function, and how experimental warming affects their overall stability under climate change,” Sarah Diamond, an assistant professor of biology at Case Western Reserve and leader of the study, said in a statement.
“We’ve looked at not only at the direct effects of warming but at indirect effects mediated by altered species interactions,” she added. “There’s good evidence the altered species interactions are affecting the stability of communities, making them more fragile and susceptible to environmental change.”
The researchers erected 15 chambers for each forest and incrementally raised the temperature from 1.5 degrees Celsius to 5.5 degrees Celsius above ambient temperature on nine of the chambers at each site.
As a result, the unheated chambers saw colonies of different ant species frequently coming and going with a near-constant overturning of nesting sites with no vacancy between occupants.
“In the heated chambers, thermophilic queens and colonies were moving in and parking,” Diamond said. “Other species couldn’t take advantage of the nesting spaces, which had the overall effect of making the community less stable and slower to return to equilibrium—in the long run, this may make them susceptible to climate change.”
The results run counter to previous studies that suggest that animal communities will quickly shift to a different, but stable state under climate change. The report also contradicts previous reports that suggest communities will remain resilient even as the Earth warms.
Further studies are needed for the long-term biological consequences of climate change.
