The Saharan silver ant builds underground lairs to escape temperatures of 120 degrees, and only comes out briefly to grab food.ĭomestic donkeys and their ancestor, the wild ass, evolved to hoard resources instead of mates.
The predator only hunts at night, when the weather cools down. The Rüppell’s fox makes a living in Iran’s Lut Desert, where the mercury has hit almost 160. They remain dormant in the heat, saving energy until rainy periods when they eat and reproduce. Creatures like the Sphincterochila snail can tolerate the direct sun of southern Israel’s desert for up to a few hours in 131-degree temperatures, and for much longer at 122 degrees.
Many species have clever adaptations to handle heat, particularly those in arid desert environments. “While evolution on its own might not be enough to keep pace with climate change for a lot of the species we’ve studied so far, it can buy us more time.” Some like it hot “Evolution gives you an important buffer,” says Sarah Diamond, an associate professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio who studied the ants. City-dwelling acorn ants can evolve over multiple generations to tolerate up to three more degrees Fahrenheit, from 115 to 118. Earth’s global temperature has risen about two degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, and the rate of warming is more than twice as fast today as it was in 1981. It’s a sobering clue into how the planet’s species-from the smallest insects to the largest mammals-are struggling to cope with a rapidly warming planet. (Read about the animals can can live in the hottest places on Earth.)
Even so, in laboratory experiments, the Mexican copepods quickly die when exposed to hotter water.Īs the "organisms heat up, their proteins actually begin to melt,” says Morgan Kelly, a biology professor at Louisiana State University who studies the two-millimeter-long crustaceans. Surprisingly, these Mexican copepods can handle temperatures about seven degrees hotter than populations of the same species in northern California. Yet even in this extreme environment, tiny crustaceans called tidepool copepods thrive. Near Baja California, Mexico, the tropical sun warms shallow tidal pools to temperatures well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
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