But studying that animal as its own habitat is also changing?ĭon't miss our Science Odyssey Contest. Studying the life of an animal in a remote Arctic ecosystem is hard enough. Welcome to the strange life of a biologist during climate change. Will cannibalism eventually weaken the spiders? Will the springtail population run amok and start to have negative effects? Or will the whole area slowly find a new normal and get balanced? Amanda and her research team don't really know what this means for the future. This is actually pretty common behaviour in other wolf spider species when the populations get larger than normal. The 'greater variety' of prey the wolf spiders were eating? Those were other young wolf spiders, a.k.a. So even though the springtail population was also exploding due to warmer weather, the spiders weren't necessarily keeping them in check.Īnd as this video shows, that appeared to actually slow down how greenhouse gases were being released!īut now a brand new study is showing a bizarre wrinkle. Areas that had more Arctic wolf spiders actually had more springtails as well, a favourite wolf spider food.įor some reason, it appeared that the more spiders there were, the more diverse their diets were (meaning they ate a greater variety of animals). In 2018, Amanda worked on a study that showed something curious. Sounds like bad news for anything that these spiders eat. They were also having more babies.īigger spiders. In the case of the Arctic wolf spider, researchers have noticed for a while that these animals were getting bigger. Bigger spiders, tooĪ female Arctic wolf spider carries its babies on its back. Suddenly, the animals that live here are experiencing longer periods of activity. The permafrost and ice is rapidly defrosting, releasing everything from greenhouse gases to fossils to artifacts. Much of the land-known as permafrost-remains frozen all year round, trapping inside it potent greenhouse gases like carbon and methane.īut as the summers have been getting longer and warmer, it has set off a chain reaction. Normally, the tundra has very short summers. One of the reasons that that the Arctic tundra is such an interesting place to study is that it is changing more-and more quickly-than most other habitats. If, in future, it produces two generations of offspring during a season, these may have a significant effect on the. Researchers set spider traps in the Alaskan tundra. The wolf spider Pardosa glacialis is extremely common in the Arctic tundra. including turning on itself!Īnd even Amanda, who has been studying them in Alaska for years, doesn't fully know what to expect next. But its feeding habits are taking unusual turns. On one hand, this key tundra predator is getting bigger and having more babies. One example of this is a set of recent studies by Amanda Koltz of the University of Washington at St. Because more often than not, the results are, well, unpredictable! The big bad wolf (spider) Even when researchers feel that they can predict what will happen in a certain situation, they still have to conduct studies and learn from what they observe. But answering the question of exactly how will it affect different ecosystems around the globe is far more complex. Actually it is believed that this spider can help diminish global warming because its diet indirectly affects the amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere. The science behind climate change and what is causing it is fairly well settled. One of its species, the Arctic wolf spider, lives in the coldest regions of the North Pole, in places like Greenland. To enter the contest, you can find details at the bottom of this post. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.Welcome back to our Science Odyssey Contest event, where we're posting STEM articles from May 2 to May 17. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file. This file contains additional information such as Exif metadata which may have been added by the digital camera, scanner, or software program used to create or digitize it.
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