Life on Earth is proving to be so uncannily adaptive to climate change, you’d almost think that a half a billion years of climate change mattered. Perhaps the precambrian clutter is not just junk, but handy tools from past lives that we may or may not need to use. Last week it was salt-water fish that got cast out of the sea by an Earthquake, and adapted to fresh water.
Stick male guinea pigs into a zone a full ten degrees hotter, and after a couple of months, his future sons and daughters will be better adapted to hot weather. Thank epi-genetics: the genes don’t change, but some get labelled “hot”, some not. Dad’s body sticks methyl groups on choice genes which upregulates them, and the pattern of activation gets passed on in genes. It’s a way of taking his lessons in life and giving his offspring a head start.
In any case, it appears in guinea pigs that there not only can this mammal cope with changes in the climate on a daily and seasonal basis, but the machiney is in place to cope with longer term changes too.
Like father like son: Epigenetics in wild guinea pigs
Fathers are able to adjust to increasing temperatures within their own lifetime and do transmit this information to their offspring. This has now been shown for the first time in a wild animal. The findings were the result of a project within the Joint Initiative for Research and Innovation and have been published in the scientific journal Molecular Ecology.
Male wild guinea pigs respond to increasing temperatures with biochemical modifications attached to their genome and pass this “epigenetic” information to the next generation, and most likely even the following one.
“We believe that the transfer of epigenetic information from father to sons prepares the latter for changes in environmental conditions such as a rise in temperature. This is particularly important with regards to a possible adaptive response to climate change. Epigenetic mechanisms could therefore be crucial for the fitness and survival of the offspring,” says Alexandra Weyrich, researcher at the IZW.
The point of this is just that biology is adaptable. That doesn’t mean that all the individuals in a given species (or every species) will survive when Armageddon comes, but it does poke a stick at the ambulance chasers who are tracking every possible lost species as a source of media juice and chanting “Extinction.Extinction.”
[h/t Science Daily]