Can an entire Arctic ecosystem evolve to adapt to the climate crisis? — SkimNews
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- The Evolving Meta-Ecosystems Institute (Evome) is a $15m (£11m), six-year NSF project led by Linda Deegan of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, probing whether species can adapt together — not just individually — to keep ecosystems intact through climate breakdown.
- Scientists are tracking five species — white-crowned sparrow, feltleaf willow, Arctic grayling, aquatic mayfly, and a ground beetle — across 15 field sites spanning a roughly 190-mile stretch of the Dalton Highway on Alaska's North Slope.
- The central ecological chain: "shrubification" by feltleaf willows along Arctic streams is disrupting mayfly and stonefly life cycles, threatening grayling (which feed on those insects) and possibly the sparrows that depend on aquatic insect hatches to feed their chicks.
- University of Alaska Fairbanks students Matthew Zimmerman and Roberto Ponce Velez collected fertilized Arctic grayling eggs for a pilot experiment, but more than half perished during transport on the notoriously bumpy Dalton Highway.
- Surviving grayling eggs are being raised in four tanks at five water temperatures (4C–20C), alongside eggs from Chena River grayling that spawn at 4C — six degrees cooler than the northern populations — so researchers can compare genetic adaptations across the Arctic.
- Evolutionary biologist Mark Urban of the University of Connecticut says hundreds of experiments document "this incredible buffer ability of adaptive evolution," pointing to scarlet monkeyflowers in Oregon and California that rapidly evolved during a four-year 2010s drought.
- The 50-strong research team is mapping genetic diversity of each study species to determine whether enough variation exists to fuel adaptation and maintain ecosystem resilience — a first-of-its-kind approach for connections between two adjacent ecosystems.
Why it matters: If co-evolution can buffer Alaska's relatively simple Arctic ecosystems, the framework becomes a predictive model for tropical and alpine systems worldwide facing the same rapid warming. But Deegan calls the optimistic outcome only a "best guess" — no prior studies have assessed whether evolution can maintain connections between two adjacent ecosystems, so Evome is also a methodological gamble.
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