Bumblebees could go extinct in decade due to climate change, scientists warn
Bumblebees are at risk of becoming extinct due to higher global temperatures and climate chaos, warn scientists in a new study. Canadian researchers found that over the course of a human generation (25 years), the likelihood of a bumblebee population surviving has plummeted by nearly a third, due to . If their decline continues at this pace, many species of the bumblebee genus could vanish forever within a few decades. Bumblebees are agricultural pollinators, meaning they carry pollen that lead to the spread and germination of human-consumed crops like tomato, squash and berries. But they cant take the heat of rising global temperatures and are now disappearing at rates 'consistent with a mass extinction'. We've known for a while that climate change is related to the growing extinction risk that animals are facing around the world, said study author Peter Soroye, a PhD student in the University of Ottawa's Department of Biology. We have now entered the world's sixth mass extinction event, the biggest and most rapid global biodiversity crisis since a meteor ended the age of the dinosaurs.' The scientists used data on 66 different bumblebee species across North America and Europe that were collected over 115 years, between 1900 and 2015. They compared where bees are now to where they used to be historically to see how their populations have changed. The likelihood of a bumble bee population surviving in a given place has declined by an average of over 30 per cent, they concluded. They also examined how climate change increases the frequency of really extreme events like heatwaves and droughts, creating climate chaos which can be dangerous for animals. Species extinctions across both Europe and North America are caused by hotter and more frequent extremes in temperatures. We found that populations were disappearing in areas where the temperatures had gotten hotter,' said Soroye. Our results show that we face a future with many less bumble bees and much less diversity, both in the outdoors and on our plates. The historical data also allowed the research team to develop a predictive tool to foresee the impact of climate change on a bee species' risk of being wiped out. 'We know that this crisis is entirely driven by human activities,' Soroye said. 'So, to stop this, we needed to develop tools that tell us where and why these extinctions will occur.' To prevent the risk of bumblebees getting completely wiped out within mere decades, the team suggest maintaining habitats that offer shelter and let bumble bees get out of the heat like trees, shrubs or slopes. The study opens the door to new areas of research, laying a platform to track extinction levels for other species like reptiles, birds and mammals. Perhaps the most exciting element is that we developed a method to predict extinction risk that works very well for bumble bees and could in theory be applied universally to other organisms, Soroye said. With a predictive tool like this, we hope to identify areas where conservation actions would be critical to stopping declines. University of Ottawa scientists previously published a paper in 2015 showing that global temperature rises were beyond the boundaries of what bumblebee species could tolerate. 'The most obvious question that we could ask subsequent to that initial work was why is this happening,' said Dr Jeremy Kerr at the university's Department of Biology, which has led to this new research, published in the .