Life responds to weather in complex manners
As they affect Life on Earth, weather functions as an event and climate functions as a process. The difference is time frame: weather happens day by day; climate reveals a pattern of weather over time.
Life responds to weather in a manner as complex as weather itself because so many factors exert influence to some degree.
A blend of gases envelop Earth in a structure we call “atmosphere,” and that atmosphere subdivides into five distinct layers defined by their specific chemistry of gases. Weather originates in the troposphere, the layer that touches Earth’s surface.
Patterns of weather differ geographically as Earth wobbles a bit while orbiting the Sun.
These patterns possess distinctive character and therefore identity at specific latitudes north and south of Earth’s equator. We know them as “zones.”
The tropical zone straddles the equator, and directly bordering it are the subtropical zones. Beyond them is the temperate zone, and beyond that the subarctic zone toward the North Pole and the subantarctic zone toward the South Pole. Then the arctic and antarctic zones.
Adaptable wildlife species can inhabit more than one zone; highly specialized species inhabit a single zone.
Different species employ different behaviors to accommodate seasonal weather changes. Some animals migrate; other animals hibernate; a few animals brumate; and likewise, some animals estivate.
Whereas hibernation and migration are generally understood responses to seasonal weather, brumation and estivation are less frequently used terms.
To brumate is to respond to winter’s cold by going inactive but without physiological changes controlled by genetics. To estivate is to respond to summer’s combination of heat and dryness by going inactive, and also without genetically controlled body changes.
Frogs and snakes brumate whereas chipmunks and bears hibernate.
Facing winter’s cold temperatures, some plants shed their leaves and some plants retain them. Some plants die back to the ground with only underground parts living through the season.
Birds molt feathers and mammals molt hairs. For some birds molting means more down for insulation, and for some mammals molting means more hairs for insulation.
Many animals — grouse among birds and moose among mammals — store large amounts of fat that when metabolized produces heat to maintain body temperature at survival levels.
Just as weather delivers variations in precipitation, temperature and wind, Life responds with a variety of strategies to survive them all. Those strategies become a tool by which we can explain and understand what wildlife lives where and when it lives there.