THE ADAPTORS

As the world warms, animals are adapting. Here are six species transforming themselves in amazing ways to cope with the rising mercury.

- THOR HANSON

THE BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE ARE too often summarized by one image: a polar bear stranded on a shrinking iceberg. Though iconic, this trope glosses over the rich story of struggle and adaptation that underpins all climate change scenarios. Because what matters is not so much the change itself, as the responses to that change. If every species was able to get along just as well in all conditions, then altering the weather wouldn't matter in the slightest. But that's not how nature works. Biodiversity stems from specialisation, a great accumulation of plants and animals adapted to particular environmental conditions. With those conditions now in flux, species must react in order to survive - changing locations, behaviours and even their bodies in profound and surprising ways.

Chilling on the rocks

Rocky Mountains, USA

Pikas benefit from a cool microclimate

IMAGINE A GREYISH-BROWN, RABBIT-LIKE creature the size of a grapefruit and nearly as round that is an American pika. These rotund little mammals inhabit high mountains from the Rockies westwards to the Pacific Ocean, and have always been considered at risk in a warming climate. Like other alpine residents, pikas have nowhere else to go when temperatures rise and habitats shift uphill. But in an era defined by change and adaptation, new research suggests they might benefit from an unusual strategy - do nothing.

Pikas live almost exclusively in and around rocky slopes known as taluses, nesting in crevices between the boulders and venturing out only a few feet to gather grasses and wildflowers from nearby meadows. (They drag the snipped vegetation back home for later consumption, storing it in piles charmingly referred to - even in scientific papers -as haystacks.)