A new research conducted by scientists at the Imperial College London has linked global warming and climate change with animal evolution and ecology.
The research, which was conducted over a period of 20 years, observed Scottish sheep and found that the sheep had changed their body shape and population size with changes in the climate. Researchers say that larger sheep were found during harsh winters while this change was not visible during milder winters.
Led by Tim Coulson, a scientist at Imperial College, this research connects changing climate with evolutionary changes for the first time. "Until now, it has proven really quite difficult to show how ecology and evolutionary change are linked, but we have developed a way to tie them together", he said.
Coulson and his team studied Soay sheep in the island of Outer Hebrides as there have been previous studies conducted on them. "The reason we looked at these sheep is they have been studied in enormous detail. Where they live is like a natural laboratory, it is a really simple system, there is just sheep and grass on the island", Coulson added.
Coulson said that during the early part of their study, with winters being harsh, larger sheep were favored a lot. But since then winters have became a lot milder, thus during the later part of their study, lots of smaller sheep were found in the population.
"We used a measure of how bad the winters were in Scotland, and this has been changing over the duration of the study. But over the years, winters have been getting a little bit better; and as winters have got better, we have found there is not as much natural selection for large animals as we saw in the past, as there is less advantage to being big", he said.
