Meanwhile, hot summers along North America’s east coast have led lobsters to migrate inshore early. Elsewhere along the north Pacific coast, various species have been spawning too early or too late to best exploit their food resource, and climate change has been blamed. This has upset their main predator, humans, who make them into McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Not only did the birds suffer, but the fruit trees missed their seed-dispersal service.Īlaska pollock have been spawning early, and missing the peak plankton bloom.
However, the food resources they expected along their migration route were reduced that same warmth caused tree fruit to ripen early and fall off. One study reported migrating birds setting off south late because the Arctic was uncharacteristically warm. Studies have identified problems for other birds, too. One can imagine people being upset by the defoliation of their trees. Recently, this has been happening in the Netherlands, where the pied flycatcher population is down by 90 per cent. If the chicks hatch too late for “peak caterpillar,” reproductive success will be affected. The parent birds have been logged delivering 60 caterpillars per hour to their chicks, which use the bonanza to fledge in two and a half weeks. Their egg laying is timed for hatchlings to emerge when oak leaf-munching caterpillars are at their peak. When this happens, reproductive success is reduced, often dramatically.Ĭloser to our climatic zone, the European pied flycatcher winters in sub-Saharan Africa, migrating north to Europe in spring. In other Arctic regions, the hatchlings of migrating geese may miss out on peak vegetation. Due to unusual warmth, the spring migration of Arctic caribou may occur after peak plant growth. In the Arctic, plant growth only begins when snow has melted. Either way, fruiting is likely to be affected.
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Usually triggered by a series of warm days, if flowers open too early, they risk damage from frost, or perhaps their insect pollinators have not yet appeared. In some tropical regions, living organisms synchronize with the rain, in temperate regions some are timed to day length, others to temperature. Within a week of this sighting, Sirius would rise too late to be seen at dawn the brightening sky would make it invisible. About a week before the river began to rise, Sirius, the Dog Star, could be spotted on the horizon just before sunrise. Before Nilometers, priests discovered they could predict the flood via astronomy. Measuring devices, called “Nilometers,” were devised to measure its height and duration - a reliable guide to that year’s harvest. The annual flood was important to ancient Egyptian civilization. (A similar, flood-dependent lifestyle also developed in southern Mali, along the Niger River.) Not only did farmers plant as the flood receded, but they became fishermen when they were not tending their crops. The life of ancient Egypt’s people synchronized with the Nile’s annual inundation. All those fish pooping in the water helped, too. Their crops were bountiful partly because of the rich silt - soil eroded from Ethiopia’s highlands - left behind by the flood water. They, in turn, sustained the newly hatched fish.Īs people settled the valley of the Nile, they began to adopt “recession agriculture.” They would seed their land as the flood water receded. The newly water-logged land was cleansed as insects emerged from their waterlogged burrows. Local fish evolved to breed during the flood. Long before there were Egyptians, the annual Nile flood was important to the country’s wildlife. This immense wetland expands to absorb the water from Uganda’s rainy season and shrinks in the dry season, thus moderating the While Nile’s flow into Sudan. The Nile’s other branch, the White Nile, is steady through the year, largely because it flows through a vast wetland, Sudan’s Sudd. The flood was caused by the Blue Nile draining Ethiopia following its annual rainy season’s drenching. Prior to the completion of the Aswan High Dam in June 1970, the River Nile flooded every year.
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