US EditionMost Insect Species Call the Tropics Home. But Climate Change Is Pushing Many of the Critters There to Their Heat Limits
More than 2,000 tropical insect species studied show many lowland insects live near heat tolerance limits, risking up to 50% heat coma under future warming, researchers say.
- Published March 4 in Nature, a team led by Dr. Kim Lea Holzmann and Dr. Marcell Peters found many tropical lowland insects are near their heat limits, based on over 2,000 species sampled during 2022–2023 field seasons.
- Limited measurement data led an international research team, supported by the German Research Foundation, to study insects, which account for around 70 percent of known animal species mostly living in the tropics.
- Working from genomic data for 677 insect species, researchers modeled protein stability to support heat tolerance findings, based on tests of about 8,000 insects across Peru and Kenya.
- Based on climate projections to the year 2100, researchers estimate up to half of tropical lowland insect populations could disappear, disrupting ecosystem functions like pollination and predation.
- If lowland species can’t raise their heat limits, warming may outpace adaptation and habitat protection may be insufficient, so researchers urge more measurement and focus on insect physiology.
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Half of Amazon insects could face dangerous heat stress
A sweeping new study of more than 2,000 insect species reveals a troubling reality: many insects may be far less capable of coping with rising temperatures than scientists once hoped. Researchers found that while some species living at higher altitudes can temporarily boost their heat tolerance, many insects in tropical lowlands—where biodiversity is highest—lack this flexibility. Because insects play essential roles as pollinators, decomposers,…
Climate change pushes tropical insects to their heat limit
Up to half of the insects in the Amazon region could be exposed to life-threatening heat levels due to progressive, anthropogenic global warming. This is shown by a recent study by the universities of Würzburg and Bremen.
It turns out that tropical lowland insects have already reached the limit of the temperature they can withstand. In the worst case scenario, the global temperature could rise to a level that would render insects immobile on more than half of the land surface of the Amazon lowlands by 2100. A research team led by Kim Holtzmann, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Würzburg in Germany, studied about 2,300 species and 242 families of inse…
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