Unexpected Victims of Climate Change

Moose

Polar bears serve as the poster children for climate change. But global warming also threatens many other species that don't get as much news coverage.

Moose in the Rocky Mountains become the latest climate change catastrophe icon recently, as their populations have plummeted with warming temperatures. But it's not just heat stress that is killing them off. Biologists are finding brain worms, liver flukes and ticks, as many as 150,000 on a single moose, are infecting the population to death.

Increased temperatures are allowing northern forest ticks to survive over the winter, when the blood-suckers and their eggs would normally die. This leaves an infected moose with no respite as the ticks breed again in the spring. The moose will continue to scratch and rub off its fur, develop anemia, and eventually die of emaciation.

Orangutan

Orangutans' populations on Borneo and Sumatra have declined by more than 80 percent during the last 75 years, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Most of that decline resulted from hunting and habitat loss as the forests were logged for timber and to make room for oil palm plantations.

Climate change may further reduce the animals' homeland, according to a study in PLOS ONE. The orangutan lives most of its life swinging in the trees and the animals' forest home faces threats of drought and fire as climate change alters weather patterns.

Koala

The koala's picky eating habits may doom it as the planet's atmosphere changes. Koalas dine solely on the leaves of eucalyptus trees. Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the air do speed up eucalyptus growth, but the leaves have lower nutritional value. Koalas need to eat more leaves to get the same amount of nutrition, according to the IUCN.

As it warms up Down Under, more forest fires and droughts threaten koalas' arboreal abodes. The IUCN named the koala as one of 10 flagship species, besides polar bears, that exemplify the effects of climate change.

Hawaiian Silversword

Like orangutans and koalas, the Haleakalā silversword (Argyroxiphium sandwicense macrocephalum) lives in a fragile habitat and would be in danger of disappearing even if the planet weren't changing. Livestock and flower-collectors nearly wiped out the plant early in the last century. Conservation programs helped the plant bounce back, but climate change has erased much of that progress, according to research in Global Change Biology. The population of the plant dropped from 65,000 in 1991 to 28,492 in 2010 as its highland habitat became warmer and dryer.

The silversword grows only on the volcanic slopes of Mount Haleakalā on the island of Maui. The plants can grow for nearly a century until it finally produces hundreds of vibrant reddish blossoms on a six-foot spike at the end of its life cycle. One to two million tourists hike to see the plants each year as they stand out against their bleak, lava-scourged surroundings.

Read more at Discovery News