Climate change may be leading to strange hostilities between different animal species over limited resources
Peering through a spotting scope in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, conservation ecologist Joel Berger and his doctoral student Forest Hayes saw something strange. On a barren ridge a mile away, a bunch of mountain goats and bighorn sheep were loitering around “these wet little muddy spots,” Berger recalls. “It’s very unusual to see them together like that.”
In a study describing their findings, published on Monday in Frontiers of Ecology and Evolution, the researchers hypothesize that such interspecies conflicts could become more common as climate change affects the availability of patchy abiotic resources such as minerals, water and snow. “Most of the public thinks in terms of what climate extremes do to us,” says Berger, a professor at Colorado State University and a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
The researchers found around two dozen examples. These included feral horses chasing pronghorns, mule deer and bighorn sheep away from water holes in the American West; of black rhino driving gemsbok out of shady spots in the desert in Namibia; and of domestic yak dominating takin over mineral deposits in the Himalayas of Bhutan. Not surprisingly, when push comes to shove over limited resources, the researchers found that larger-bodied animals tend to win.
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