Climate change is reshaping the world, and maybe nothing can be better than being in the wild. As ecosystems change, species are forced to move to new places to find the resources they need. Unlike some human boundaries that are visible to human fences and walls, there are many borders throughout the wild that crisscross one another. When climate change causes animals to migrate, it may cross one of these boundaries and there are new challenges waiting.
Some new immigrants quietly adapted to their new environment. Others are rogue and become invasive, throwing the lives of native species into chaos. These invasions are becoming increasingly common, which means more and more native species are forced to make choices: to evolve to survive or perish.
Love song disappears
Pacific wild cricket in the Hawaiian Islands (Telegryllus Oceanicus) Evolution – How. Avoid parasite hunting called invasive Ormia ochracea, They have started remixing the songs they have found to find a partner. But according to Research recently published exist Current Biologythese escape plans may not be foolproof, at least not yet.
About 30 years ago O. ochracea Flies flew from tropical America to Hawaii, and love songs of Pacific Field Cricket disappeared from the island. Using a keen sense of hearing, flies are able to zero on male cricket when singing and putting eggs in cricket’s corpse. When the larvae hatch, they feed on the nutrients around them, and eventually dig out and kill the cricket.
“About 20 years ago, we found a population on Kauai. [in Hawaii] This has been completely silent because mutations in their wings eliminate the sound structures produced in these crickets,” said Professor Robin Tinghitella of the University of Denver. “The men still rub their wings together, but there is no sound. This is a very crazy discovery. The mutation swept the island as it protected cricket from flies. ”
Recently, however, Tinghitella’s group discovered the Pacific Stadium cricket crowd that still sings – but the music is a little different: it contains some other soft purr and rattle. Its frequency and amplitude are different from the original music. Researchers found that it is still loud enough to attract women, but quiet enough to escape O. ochracea fly.
For Tinghitella, the new adaptability of cricket marks “a rapid pace of evolutionary change”.
step by step? no thanks
“This makes us wonder: Will the flies continue to grow?” she continued. “This begins a series of laboratory and field experiments to see if the fly’s neural and behavioral responses are in response to changes in cricket songs”.
To test whether flies develop in sync with prey, the researchers compared the sensitivity of Hawaiian flies to certain sounds and frequencies to those of natural flies from Florida labs. The ancestors’ Florida flies are most sensitive to sounds around 4-6 kHz, which is also the frequency of cricket that is the most common. On the other hand, the researchers found O. ochracea The fly expands the hearing range and adjusts the sound from 6 kHz to 6 kHz.
Next, they placed the live fly on a spherical treadmill with speakers on both sides. When they play a synthetic pre-recorded cricket song, the Hawaiian flies are more sensitive to the hoarse sound of Pacific wild cricket than their ancestors.
Despite the cricket efforts to stay under the radar, flies can still find them.
“What we’re seeing is not the classic step by step co-evolution, cricket changes a little in one direction, and then the flies track that carefully,” Tinghitella said. “Instead, flies become more sensitive to a variety of sounds that may allow them to track various changes in cricket.”
When male cricket makes new sounds, they don’t change the way they interact with flies. This time, women’s cricket about male songs has also become less picky. “If women still only like traditional songs, then men have mutations [that cause purrs and rattles] It won’t succeed. They will be extinct locally,” Tinghitella said.
A new challenge
How quickly and how quickly a species can evolve depends on its elasticity, time to produce, The plasticity of traitsand ecological pressure. For example, organisms with short generation times (e.g. insects) will reproduce rapidly, so they have more evolutionary opportunities that may enable them to Faster response speed Facing new threats. Likewise, more life-long species may be more vulnerable. Even with these considerations, unexpected and synergistic pressures could still destabilize both species, said Viraj Torsekar, an ecologist at Gitam, who is considered the university.
Insect populations are found in many parts of the world. Their extinction rate is estimated to be High eight times More than birds, mammals or reptiles. Even if conditions become more unfavorable in a short period of time than usual, such as bad weather every year – the population may collapse rather than longer-lived organisms, said professors from the Department of Ecology and Evolution.
As global warming, extreme weather and biological invasions intensify, it is becoming increasingly challenging to predict how species with different ecological needs will cope with compounding pressures. Many researchers are studying genomic architecture of wild insect species Predict their ability adapt.
According to Tinghitella, rapid evolution can explain why some invaders do well, or why certain species manage to cope. To predict how these interactions will work in the long run, understanding how evolution occurs in these situations is key.
Rupsy Khurana is the head of science communication and outreach at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.
publishing – May 14, 2025 at 05:30 AM IST
