Large wild mammals – from elephants to antelopes – are already struggling to cope with global warming. Now new research shows that even the small creatures adapted to harsh, arid landscapes may be reaching their limits.
Even though they’re accustomed to living in semi-desert environments, the African striped mice of southern Africa are showing signs that they too suffer from climate-related rising heat and worsening droughts.
As a team of eco-physiologists, we discovered this recently through a study of how the effect of global warming on wild mammals in the desert can be measured by the thickness of their blood. It is generally known from physiology that dehydration leads to higher concentration of substances in the blood, but this is the first study to see whether drought has this effect in wild living mammals.
