Global warming isn’t only affecting animals like polar bears. African wild dog populations may also collapse due to climate change
“The severity of the impact even surprised me — around the middle case scenario the model predicts catastrophic population collapse,” said the study’s lead author, quantitative ecologist Daniella Rabaiotti, a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant and Honorary Research Fellow at“The model predicts that wild dogs are able to maintain the number of breeding individuals in the population under 1-3 degrees of warming, but, above that threshold, the number of packs — and the entire population — collapses,”...
“The predicted population collapse is driven by the fact that, above a certain temperature threshold, too few pups are surviving to adulthood, leading to packs, and subsequently the entire population, collapsing,” Dr Rabaiotti explained. Replacement of lost packs is driven by dispersing individuals that establish new packs, Dr Rabaiotti noted, but as temperatures increase, both new packs, and the population as a whole, still shrinks.
“As ever, we wouldn’t be talking about climate change without habitat loss. Wild dogs are confined to just 7% of their historic range — this means they can’t track the changing climate,” Dr Rabaiotti said. “Habitat loss remains the biggest threat — but climate change could push them over the edge.” “We cannot afford to sit by and let countless species go extinct while we still have the chance to save them.”
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