The adorable American pika is believed to be disappearing as a result of man-made climate change.
New research suggests the animals are disappearing from 10 of their 67 known locations in the mountains of western North America, the University of California-Santa Cruz reported.
Pikas are small herbivores that are related to rabbits that are well-adapted to cold temperatures at high elevations. The animals spend their summer gathering plants to store for winter munching since they do not hibernatye.
"Backpackers and hikers often see pikas scurrying back and forth across the rocks, gathering little bouquets of wildflowers in their mouths," said Joseph Stewart, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and first author of a paper. "They are uniquely adapted to cold temperatures, but these same adaptations make the species vulnerable to global warming."
When summer temperatures are too high, pikas cannot leave their underground abodes due to the risk of overheating. This means the animals cannot gather as much food and have a greater chance of starving over the winter.
The findings are significant because pikas play important ecological roles by acting as prey for owls and stouts, which have an influence on the local vegetation and soil composition.
Researchers developed a predictive model that could help determine the fate of the dwindling pikas in response to global warming. The model suggests that by the year 2070, the pikas will have disappeared from between 39 and 88 percent of their historical California range. The model took into account "different degrees of atmospheric sensitivity to greenhouse gases and different levels of human emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," the researchers reported. If only modest action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the model predicts pikas will disappear from 75 percent of the sites by 2070, and 51 percent if aggressive action is taken.
"It looks like we're going to lose pikas from many areas where people have been used to seeing them. It's a loss not just for the pikas but also for future generations who won't get to have that experience," Stewart said.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of Biogeography.
