Frankenstein’s monster planet How humanity ‘tampering with nature’ is now accelerating evolution
Giant squid shrunk to the size of carrots, mutated lizards, mosquitoes on the London Underground that can carry West Nile fever, super-cockroaches and monster bacteria: nature is responding to climate change in ways never imagined. Our Writer at Large speaks to biologists to discover what’s really going on Neil Mackay
HUMANITY is a species of Dr Frankensteins. Our actions are now morphing life on Earth in ways both astonishing and terrifying.
The emerging science of “climate change biology” has discovered how our behaviour is speeding up evolution – sometimes creating effects in just weeks which usually take millennia.
Giant squid the size of humans are now no bigger than carrots – because of climate change. Caribbean lizards are evolving in the space of one summer – because of climate change.
There are mosquitoes on the London Underground which can carry West Nile fever, hammerhead sharks off Britain’s coast, and “super-cockroaches” in Germany evolved to resist any poison.
On a microbial level, we’re storing up a world of pain – laying down a path to another, possibly more deadly, pandemic. Human meddling means bacteria can evolve complete resistance to even the strongest antibiotics in just three months. Our showers are full of deadly bugs which have learned to bypass chlorination.
Two of the world’s most brilliant scientists have brought out new books on climate change biology, both of which present stark warnings for the future of human life, and all life, on Earth. Evolutionary biologist Professor Rob Dunn has written A Natural History of the Future: What the laws of biology tell us about the destiny of the human species; and the globe-trotting conservationist and biologist Thor Hanson has written Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: How the natural world is adapting to climate change.
The Herald on Sunday spoke to both scientists to find out just how dire things really are on our troubled planet.
UK hammerheads
NATURE is responding to humanity with a MAD strategy – move, adapt or die. We have turned the climate so upside down that if plants and animals can’t run, hide or change, then they’re kaput. Anywhere up to 85 per cent of the Earth’s species are physically moving, “shifting their ranges in response to climate change”, says Hanson, “looking for conditions they’re used to”. The direction of travel is towards the cooler poles.
That’s why we’re seeing hammerhead sharks in UK waters. “If you look around Britain,” Hanson says, “you see all kinds of changes on land and in the water. You see plankton species that have moved north which weren’t there – and also those incredible creatures, the hammerheads, which are now being sighted more and more regularly as they expand northwards.” Hammerheads are usually found in the Mediterranean and off the coast of north Africa.
“Marine heat waves,” Hanson explains, are leading to “rapid movement of species colonising new areas.”